KICKING ON
Caradh O’Donovan on chasing her Olympics dream while battling Crohn’s disease
‘I HAD TO PULL OUT OF A TOURNAMENT IN BELGIUM WHEN I GOT SICK’
CARADH O’DONOVAN should have been in Paris last weekend, pursuing her dream to represent Ireland in karate at the Tokyo Olympics. Instead, she was bunkered down in her family home outside Sligo town, where she has transformed part of her mother’s dining room into a makeshift gym.
‘It is a lousy situation, but everyone is in the same boat,’ O’Donovan sighs. ‘I am not the only one whose Olympic dream is on hold and that’s going to be the case until we get a grip on the coronavirus. That’s the most important thing.’
O’Donovan has faced greater challenges in her life than that posed by the postponement of the Olympic qualification tournament.
Having earned a reputation as one of the top kickboxers in the world, her life was flipped upside down in 2014 when she was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease, a debilitating condition that causes inflammation of the bowel.
She has refused to be defined by the incurable illness, though. On a TED talk she delivered a couple of years ago – available on YouTube –
O’Donovan proclaims: ‘Whatever obstacles life throws at me, I now know I can overcome them and be successful.’
Less than three years ago, in her early 30s, O’Donovan took a diversion.
After more than two decades in kickboxing, which saw her collect national, European and World Cup titles as well as three world championship bronze medals, she fancied something different. Karate was initially supposed to be a hobby.
But O’Donovan couldn’t abandon her competitive spirit.
Even though a novice, she went on a trek from her Terenure home to Larkhill Karate Club on Dublin’s northside where national team coach Paul Brennan and the topranked fighters were based.
‘Initially, I went for a couple of sessions to see if I was any good, if I liked it. There was no point competing if I didn’t enjoy the sport. I was pretty straightup. I was going into the sport to try and get to the Olympics. That’s why I picked that club. Maybe it didn’t go down well with some of the girls that I was muscling in on their turf, but I knew that’s what I had to do if I wanted to get where I wanted to go.’
Having sat near the top of the world rankings in kickboxing, O’Donovan now had to start on the first rung a new sport.
‘I knew it was going to be tough. I was starting a new sport in my early 30s. There is a lot of catching-up to do, and I was going from being known as one of the best in the world right to the bottom of the pile.’
She quickly discovered there were more differences, than similarities, between the two combat sports.
‘The fight takes place on the same matted area but whereas there are three two-minute rounds in kickboxing, karate has only one three-minute round. There is less scope for mistakes.
‘In kickboxing, you can hit much harder which was always good for me because my strength was one of my main assets. But in karate, you get penalised for hitting too hard because it is about control. I never got disqualified but it is definitely something I struggled with in the beginning and had to make adjustments.’
O’Donovan wasn’t the first worldclass kickboxer to switch sports. Encouragement was found in the British pair Charlie Maddock and Michael Page, who successfully crossed over to taekwondo and MMA respectively. And she followed in their footsteps. Within a year of taking it up, she was a national champion, on the Ireland team and inside the world’s top 70 for the – 61kg weight class, which ensured entry into the topranking events.
A dark cloud did hang over the sport which threatened O’Donovan’s Olympic aspirations. The body governing Irish karate had split into two factions and while the athletes were behind the group recognised by Sport Ireland, the other faction was recognised by the World Karate Federation, who facilitated qualification for Tokyo.
‘That was a bit of a mess and the athletes were caught up in it,’ she recalls.
‘There were basically two different groups claiming to be the NGB (National Governing Body). The athletes sided with the group that Sport Ireland backed but the WKF went with the other group, and that was where the issue was because they controlled entry into the Olympic qualifiers.’
Things got so bad that O’Donovan and the rest of the Irish team went to the world championships without their coaches, who weren’t allowed.
‘It was so messy. As much as karate is an individual sport, there is a huge team element to it. Trust is a big thing among team-mates and coaches. When you are competing at the highest level of karate, you need someone you can trust in your corner, the coach you know.’
In elite competition, fighters have use of a video replay card, which will allow them to have contentious points replayed. It is the coach’s responsibility but at that world championships, none of the Irish fighters could turn to a coach.
‘The guy who sat in my corner put the card in his pocket and didn’t take it out for the whole fight,’ O’Donovan remembers, still clearly annoyed by the events.
Frustrated by the lack of progress on any sort of solution, the Sligo woman reached out to Global Athlete, a relatively new group that aims to give competitors a stronger voice in the administration of their sport. They helped to broker a resolution with the world federation and Irish karate is now re-building under new leadership.
The whole episode awakened an activist bent in O’Donovan that she never knew existed. For 20 years, she thought her only responsibility as an athlete was to win medals and perform to her best. Now, as part of the Global Athlete group, O’Donovan wants to give sportspeople a proper and meaningful voice.
‘It has started a new chapter in my life, sparking an interest that I didn’t know I had,’ she says.
‘Governance issues aren’t just a problem in karate, or Irish sport. It is across the board. And there should be more of an input from athletes into the governance of their sport. Athletes need to have more of an input into the decisions that affect them. At the moment, they have little or no say in how their sport is run and that’s not right.
‘There has been plenty of talk of athlete welfare and player welfare recently. Maybe it is gradually changing, but until athletes are at the table and helping to make the decision in how sports are run, it will just be tokenism. There must be meaningful representation of athletes in the decision-making process in every sport.
‘It has been a new road that I have
gone down but it is something that really interests me. Even if I don’t get to the Olympics when they do take place, I think this will be something I am going to put more of my energy into over the coming years.’
Given that O’Donovan has a degree in sports management from UCD, and a masters in sports psychology from Waterford IT, this aspect of sport seems a natural fit. And her life has revolved around sporting endeavours since first putting on kickboxing pads as a 12-year-old.
She took up the sport by chance. There weren’t many other options around Sligo at the time for a sportsmad young girl. ‘I had played basketball, but wasn’t really into it and the local GAA club didn’t have a girls’ team at the time. So, there wasn’t a whole amount of choice.
‘There was a kickboxing club in town, so I went down there one day to try it. Once I set foot inside the door of the place, it was nearly impossible to get me out. I loved it from the first moment.’
O’Donovan tried to convince some friends to join the club, to no avail. ‘The sessions were in an old community hall, and it was a bit manky. There were no changing facilities for girls. Any of my friends that came down with me turned on their heels when they saw the place.’
Still, O’Donovan had a talent. She soon started collecting regional and national titles.
‘It was 24 years ago when I started, so there weren’t too many girls competing in Ireland. There are a lot more now. Winning the titles soon after I started built up my confidence in the sport but once I started competing internationally, the standards went way up and I had to deal with that.
‘But from the moment I started, combat sports and martial arts just felt natural. There is something in life that just fits for everyone and combat sports is that for me. I felt that from the moment I started kickboxing. I had to work very hard to reach the top, had my fair share of bad results, but couldn’t see myself doing any other sport.’
In 2013, the Irish Taekwon-Do Federation contacted O’Donovan about taking up their sport with a view to qualifying for the Rio Olympics.
‘They had a talent transfer programme, looking at athletes from other sports, so I started training out in South Dublin (Taekwondo) club, where Jack Woolley trains now. But I could only do it for six months, because it was around the time I was getting sick. I still have a national medal, though.’
For over a year, O’Donovan was living with excruciating pain in her stomach and abdomen, but she kept the huge discomfort mostly to herself, something she now regrets. Things came to a head in the spring of 2014 while on holidays with her mother and sister in the Canaries.
O’Donovan had been ill in bed for most of the holiday. One afternoon when her mother came back to the apartment to check on her, she was shocked to see her daughter crawling from the bathroom on all fours.
‘It gave her the fright of her life. We both started to cry and she convinced me to get it checked out.
‘I had been living with this agony and pain for over a year, that it was almost normalised in my head. I knew it wasn’t normal, but I was thinking that this was just the way it was going to be.
‘Before I got diagnosed, it would have affected me in competition.
‘I remember the 2013 world championships.
‘I was flying through the rounds and feeling very confident then just before the semi-final, I got serious stomach pains and got really sick.
‘I ended up getting completely bashed by my opponent. I had to pull out of my first international karate competition in Belgium, too, because I got sick. But mostly, I am able to manage it now.
‘When I came back from the Canaries, I went for scans and it was clear pretty quickly that I was suffering from Crohn’s disease. It is something I just have to live with. It is going to be with me for the rest of my days unless they find a cure for it.
‘It is not something that has held me back a huge amount. I have been fortunate in that the medication works for it, it doesn’t work for some people. Look, I had to change my lifestyle and diet, but I have been able to remain in sport with it, and that was the most important thing for me.’
The diagnosis did make O’Donovan start to think of a life without sport. And those thoughts were sharpened last year when she missed a bulk of the karate season with a nasty leg injury. Having turned 36 recently, she knows time may be short at elite level.
‘I know at some point, whether it’s five years or whenever, I won’t be able to compete at the highest level anymore.
‘When I was injured last year, it gave me a glimpse into life without sport. I was pretty down about not being able to compete but I decided to start planning for it because not every athlete gets to retire on their own terms,’
O’Donovan does occasional work for the Dame Kelly Holmes Trust, giving talks to schoolchildren about her experiences, and she signed up for a course provided by the Trust called ‘transition from sport’ in January
‘The idea is to make easier for athletes when they retire,’ she explains. But Caradh O’Donovan is hoping that day is still far away into the future. It is a beautiful day in her native Sligo where she came to once the lockdown was announced, as she had more room than in her flat in Dublin.
More space, too. She is planning to do some training in the garden, maybe go for a run on the quiet roads.
All with the goal still in mind of the Tokyo Olympics, whenever they may be.