Carr soldiers on as she takes road less travelled for Paris
Triathlete with sporting pedigree has laboured hard in pursuit of qualifying for Olympics
“The triathlon gave me that buzz back for competing”
Elizabeth Carr
Elizabeth Carr has vague memories of the Dublin football team visiting her home on Sunday mornings as a toddler. Otherwise, it didn’t impact her life that her father, Tommy, was then the Dublin football manager.
Growing up in Mullingar, her first sporting love was athletics. She started with the Community Games as a sprinter/hurdler before graduating to middle and long distances with Mullingar Shamrocks AC.
Libby won 11 junior All-Ireland titles and represented Ireland in schools’ cross-country. Then her form plateaued. Her dream of securing an athletics scholarship to a US college remained unfulfilled.
When she was in transition year, her parents, who had dabbled in the sport, suggested she try the triathlon.
“I suppose they saw the frustration I was having with athletics. But they also saw that, physically, I was very strong and triathlon is a sport you need to be strong at and you need to want to work hard. I think they are two things that have stood to me.
“I gave it a go at a really, really basic level. It wasn’t for me. Then I came back to it in college. It was a case of ‘my parents don’t know what they’re talking about’ in transition year and then in college it was like, ‘actually, maybe they have a point’.
“I think the triathlon gave me that buzz back again for competing at a high level and actually achieving some success.”
Now, she is involved in a race against time to qualify for the Paris Olympics.
The qualification process is complicated and has taken the 29-year-old Irish Army captain to far-flung destinations in Africa, the Caribbean, and Asia.
Destination
Her next destination is Samarkand, a city in south-eastern Uzbekistan, where she will compete in her first World Cup triathlon next weekend before a final qualification race in Kazakhstan a week later.
“I only started to try and qualify last November. Due to injury, I missed a whole year that everyone else had.”
Categorised as a developing athlete by World Triathlon, she has competed in seven races in the last six months on the second-tier Africa and Americas Continental Cup circuits.
“There are two streams into the Olympics,” she explains. “There is the main qualification pathway and then there is a second pathway, which is kind of like a wild card or a back-door pathway, which is the one that I am aiming for because I am so late coming on to the scene.
“The slot is basically given to a country from each continent that hasn’t qualified someone already, so currently there are three girls from three countries (Turkey, Slovakia, and Slovenia) ahead of me. What I am basically looking for them to do is qualify via the main pathway to free up that slot for me.”
Though not funded by Sport Ireland, Carr is currently ranked 126th in the world and 64th in Europe. Seven months ago, she had no ranking.
A plantaris tendon injury, which first flared up in June 2022 but wasn’t diagnosed for months, put her Olympic dream in jeopardy.
“I injured my Achilles and the plantaris tendon runs alongside the Achilles, and during the healing process, my plantaris tendon got stuck to my Achilles tendon, but nobody could diagnose this for months.
“So a lot of time was wasted trying to find someone who could diagnose it. In the end, I had surgery in May of last year to remove a section of the plantaris from the Achilles.”
Two weeks later, she was back on a stationary bike; within four, she was back in the pool. Then she won a sprint duathlon in Youghal before competing in two Continental Cups in November.
The sports gene runs deep in the Carr family.
Her mother Mary is the daughter of Galway football icon Seán Purcell. As well as managing Dublin, Cavan, and Roscommon, her father Tommy captained Dublin and won an All-Star in 1991, as well as five Leinster Championships and two National League medals.
Her three siblings, Simon, Vicky, and Gareth, have excelled in tennis, GAA, and golf, respectively.
Since his early teens, Simon has played on the international tennis circuit and is well used to foreign travel. But even he was taken aback by Elizabeth’s globe-trotting itinerary.
“He understands. I don’t even have to tell him, he just understands. He has done some wild travel. There were two races I had to do at the start of the year. I had to go to Zimbabwe one week and then Cuba the week after.
“I remember telling him this and he said, ‘Elizabeth, what are you doing? You’re not going to survive’. Even after all his escapades, he thought that was crazy, but I still went ahead and did it anyway.”
She ended up winning the sprint event in Zimbabwe and finished seventh in the full Olympic distance (1.5km swim, 40km cycle and 10km run) in Cuba.
While her father served in the Irish Army, she had not considered it as a career option. She studied sports science at DCU, but at the suggestion of her parents she applied and was accepted into the Defence Forces’ cadet programme.
Seven years later, she attained the rank of captain and was the platoon commander of the 118th Infantry Battalion on peacekeeping duties with UNIFIL in Lebanon in 2021.
She took leave in February as she chased her Olympic dream. It’s a long shot, but in words attributed to Robert Louis Stevenson: “It is better to travel hopefully than to arrive. And the true success is to labour.”
Elizabeth Carr has laboured in pursuit of a place in Paris.