‘I LEFT BEHIND TRYING TO BE A HARDMAN’
Dubliner Paul Olima was an angry teen getting into fights before he found his path through sport and school — and let his natural sense of humour shine. A sports pro, body double, fitness coach and Instagram star, he’s now written a book that calls out fa
‘So much of what I see online is basically porn. It annoys me when I see lads doing it and I go for them, but some girls can get away with it too easily. If you want to get your arse out and show people your arse, just take a picture. Just don’t try to wrap it around fitness. “I’m all-natural. I’ve never done a steroid in my life. If I did, I’d look like [bodybuilder] Ronnie Coleman. I’m at the max I could be at after 20 years of lifting and I know when people are jabbing [steroids] because they get to my size in three years.”
Whether it’s steroid use or influencers climbing aboard the fitness bandwagon, Paul Olima, a 15-year veteran of professional sports, is pulling no punches. The Dubliner has played soccer in the UK — with varying degrees of success — before moving, via sports modelling and body doubling for Mario Balotelli, Anthony
Joshua and Yaya Touré, to professional rugby and, finally, sports choreography and “doing stupid shit online”. Now 34 and a father of two daughters, he is acutely aware that what passes for fitness content on social media is often barely on nodding terms with health. And he’s not staying quiet.
Indeed, the professional sportsplayer turned professional piss-taker might be the antidote the toxic Insta-fitness industry needs.
He has particular scorn for influencers who devise inadequate meal plans for their followers, heedless of the potential consequences.
“There are people on Instagram giving fitness plans to people with 1,200 calorie diets. Girls were losing their periods over this shit.
“There are so many cowboys out there, and then they go on to sell fitness bands. Because it’s like, ‘What can I make money from?
Interview
Fitness bands!’ It frustrates me.” The frustration has been channelled into a new book, Fit: Smash Your Goals And Stay Strong For Life, a sort of annotated guidebook to finding your perfect exercise, which also eulogises the transformational power of fitness.
This is his own personal experience; at 19, sport took him from west Dublin to trials for West Ham. “I wasn’t good enough, there were players there that were absolutely outstanding.”
His agent got him another trial, at Scunthorpe United, but he was taken off at half-time.
From there, he went to Bristol
Rovers, who put him on loan to Taunton Town. “Down in the very bottom corner of England.” Then Bristol play Swansea City and another player is in his position. “I call my agent and I’m like, ‘Are they trialling another player?’ He says: ‘Oh, I’m really sorry’.”
If this were Hollywood, the story arc would have been a sure and steady rise to victory. In real life, it took a detour via Essex, specifically Dagenham & Redbridge Foootball Club.
The team had been promoted to the League, which was just as well, as Olima had vowed: “I couldn’t tell my mates that I was playing in the Conference.”
He moved in with his brother in Hendon, north-west London, commuting every day to go to training. Ever the optimist, he was relentlessly hopeful.
“I did that for two years and it was an absolute nightmare. I said to myself, ‘Paul, lookit, you’re gonna be a footballer. Don’t worry, it’s grand’,” he laughs.
Life had other ideas. “Dagenham & Redbridge started putting on me on loan to semi-pro teams. And I thought, ‘I’m. Not. That. Good. I’m-not-that-good’,” he says.
This was particularly painful — he had hoped to be capped for Ireland. “I’d learned Amhrán na bhFiann off because I’d be in the pub with my mates and none of them would know the words. I said to myself, ‘Alright, Paul. You’re going to sign for West Ham and play for Ireland and when the national anthem comes on and it goes to your face, you’re gonna sing at the top of your lungs’.
“Then, there I was on loan from Dagenham & Redbridge, and I was like, ‘where did I think I was goin’?”
Inspired by one coach at the club, he started taking his coaching badges and was offered a move to nearby Thurrock, with the same pay but better terms. With time on his hands, he started personal training and managed to pick up work modelling for a sportswear brand. “You’d get something like two grand for the day and I might get one of those every month. Then I was getting one every two weeks.”
When the modelling work dried up, a better gig came along, standing in for stars in adverts. “Mario Balotelli needed a body double and I got it. I got paid a grand a day and I might be there for three days. Because Mario was so hot, everyone was using him. And then I was doing [body double for] Yaya Touré.”
The money allowed him to pack in the personal training.
With his football career stalling, he was now playing the Ryman division, “one underneath the Conference”. He had another word with himself. “Lookit, Paul, when you played rugby in Castleknock College, it was the greatest sports days. It was so much fun. You love rugby.”
He pivoted with characteristic confidence. “I was like, ‘I’m gonna play for Ireland’!”
He aimed for the Harlequins, the top London rugby union team. “Eh, I didn’t start off there,” he admits. “I started off playing international Sevens for Nigeria. [His parents are originally from Nigeria.] The first thing we did was a Rugby Sevens tournament in Mombasa and I scored loads of tries.”
He came back to the UK and
signed with Esher, where he stayed for three years. “Through them, I was able to play for ’Quins through the reserve.”
Three years in, he was offered to join a new side who wanted to make the league and were offering big money. He sustained a severe injury, costing him not just his career but sponsorship and modelling gigs that went with it.
“And that’s when I started doing stupid shit online.”
“Stupid shit online” has transitioned into something of a second career — being an occasional YouTuber with his ex-girlfriend, influencer Megan Rose Lane, and an Instagram account (284k followers) where he parodies the Insta-fitness accounts of fellow influencers.
He certainly has an eye for comedy. His ‘Shit Instagram
Fitness Awards’ is a mock awards ceremony, a bit like a high-concept Bad Sex prize with added Lycra.
His comedy tilts heavily at the intersection of fit-fluencer and Love Island contestant, but some might say he’s leaning that way himself. Last year, he was hired by ITV2’s Maura Higgins: You’ve Joking Me! to put the former Love Island contestant through a gruelling fitness challenge. “I meant to do
There are people on Instagram giving fitness plans to people with 1,200 calorie diets. Girls were losing their periods over this shit
that every year with whoever comes out of Love Island.”
In 2016, a popular turn on ITV’s Take Me Out was reported breathlessly in the tabloids.
He’s had a couple of near misses with other shows. “I was meant to go on [Love Island] four years ago, but then I got back with my ex-girlfriend who I had my second baby with.
“I was meant to be on The Circle
last year, to go in on day 21, but on day 10 I asked to leave because I was missing my best mate’s wedding.”
Not quite Love Island then, but certainly sufficently in the archipelago that his social media output might provoke a few testy interactions from critics. These days, however, Olima is well able for any such verbal jousting.
When he was younger though, things were often more physical.
His father’s GP practice was in Cabra — his mother is an entrepreneur — and he grew up around Clonsilla and Blanchardstown. His older brothers went to Blackrock College and were suitably academic.
“They took the pressure off all of
us and then I’m the second youngest and I was really good at football. So [my father] thought I was going to play for Man United.”
Off the ball, however, he was increasingly handy with his fists. “Growing up, I was really aggressive. I think I had to be. When I was in school I learned to be the class clown, because it got me away with stuff. So instead of people going, ‘Oh, the black fella’, they’d laugh and want to be around me.”
He relates a story of being in junior infants and already being acutely aware of being different. “I remember being in Irish class and the first thing I said, I put up my hand and said, ‘Eh, Miss I’m Black, should I be learning Gaeilge?’And the whole class laughed.”
Comedy wasn’t enough to escape the inevitable racism though. “The first time I was called the N-word, I remember going home and my da said, ‘If anyone ever says that, you should fight back’. I went to school the next
I learned to be the class clown, because it got me away with stuff. So instead of people going, ‘Oh, the black fella’, they’d laugh and want to be around me
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Interview
day and smacked up the kid. That was when I realised I needed to, like, back myself. I couldn’t take a step backwards, I’d have to fight.
“I’d probably had around 200 fist fights by the time I was 18. I had loads of friends from that area who knew me and played football with me and they all stuck up for me.”
Despite his obvious affection for his upbringing, it does sound tense. “Me and me mates used to go to Cabra or Finglas, where people didn’t know me. And they’d go, ‘Let’s go into this pub’. And I’m like, ‘F**k sake, here we go’. Then we walk into the pub and the whole pub would stop and look around. After that, you’re waiting for someone to say something, because you know they’re all thinking it. When somebody says something, I had to be ready to fight.
“If my mates went, ‘I’ll meet you down at this pub’. I’d be like, ‘What time are yiz getting there?’ I’m losing it now that I’ve lived in London for 15 years, but there was a time when I’d stand outside and I’d wait cause I’m not gonna be first in there, looking like the little black fella that nobody knows, waiting for somebody.
It got to a stage when I thought I was pretty tough. If somebody looked at me, my first words would be, ‘What are you looking at?’ And that would be the catalyst for a fight.”
It’s hard to square this version of an angry young man with the self-effacing, easy-going one I encounter. He says his parents tried their best to steer him right. Eventually, a transformation did take place, he admits, and he credits Castleknock College — and sport — with much of it.
“I love how I grew up and I love the values I learned from Ireland, but Castleknock College straightened me out, definitely. On my first day there someone kicked me in the back accidentally. I was this Blanch lad going to this school with a bunch of poshies. I turned around and I go, ‘See you, if you do that again, I’ll punch your teeth in’. The works.
“After the class, the fella came up to me. He was the popular lad in the year. He goes, ‘I don’t know where you’ve been before, but in this school, we don’t go around thinking we’re hard men.’ It made me feel like shit. And he was right.
“It’s about being a good lad, being one of the boys. I learned rugby culture through that school, and I left behind trying to be a hard man.”
We are speaking a week after the fatal Garda shooting of George Nkencho, not far from where
Olima was raised in north-west Dublin. He pauses.
“I got sent messages, saying, ‘Paul, you have to say something’. Why? Who am I to say it? How I feel about it is that it’s a terrible tragedy for his family I don’t feel like it’s a race [issue].”
Although he clearly misses Dublin and still sees “the lads” relatively frequently, he lives in London where he is raising his daughters, aged two and 11.
In the book, he writes of the challenge of raising an almost-teenage girl in the age of social media. It soon becomes clear why he feels social media can be toxic and why he feels compelled to break ranks and criticise his fellow influencers and content creators.
“My eldest is on TikTok. And TikTok at the start was for kids, but it’s not any more. So I know she’s in the flow of it so I have to teach her the ways of it, like, ‘You can watch this but you have to love yourself’. I’ll tell her I love her every day or show her she’s special. It’s hard to explain the subtleties but there’s certain things you cannot hide from her.
“Like someone got their lips
done and the kids were saying,
‘Oh. I can’t wait until I’m old enough to get my lips done’. And I was like, ‘You? You don’t need to get your lips done! You’ve lovely lips!
“But it’s a hard one to mess around with because you can’t shield them from it. It’s just about building her confidence as she grows.”
It seems likely that a career in front of the camera, be it on television or online, beckons for Paul Olima, and probably not in Dublin. But he’s unequivocal about where his home is.
“Everything — my voice, everything — is Ireland and it’s not that I love myself, but I love who I’ve become. I don’t think it’s possible to come from anywhere else in the world and get the same values. Streetwise from Blanch, and then being a good human from Castleknock. My heart is Ireland to the death.” l