Less chat more medals now for the O’Donovans
THERE has been a world champion spotted around the UCC campus in the past couple of weeks. Paul O’Donovan has just entered an accelerated medicine programme in the university, although he missed the first two weeks of lectures because there was the world lightweight double sculls title to win with his brother Gary in Bulgaria.
‘It is graduate entry medicine,’ Paul explains. ‘Everyone that does it has a first degree already and it’s four years then. We do a year and a half of this programme and then join up with the direct entry programme when they are half-way through.’
It will take Paul more than four years to become a fully qualified doctor. There are the Olympics in Tokyo to prepare for and he is planning to defer his second year to allow himself and Gary, who is a full-time rower at the moment after graduating with a marketing degree from CIT, no distractions ahead of the 2020 games.
Their performance in the recent world championship – former Olympian Sam Lynch claimed it was the best they had ever rowed together – will only increase expectation that they can turn Rio silver into Tokyo gold. But the brothers appear too down-to-earth to get too caught up in what the public believe will happen.
‘We are not really doing it for the public or the media or television, we are just doing it for ourselves,’ Paul insists. ‘We don’t care what’s written about us if we finish fourth or last or win it. That’s just something aside that you don’t think about. For us we both have college degrees and it’s not going to be the be-all and end-all if we don’t win it. We will have a life after it to move onto.’
Following their success in Rio, the brothers from West Cork became instant celebrities. They even wound up on the couch of the Graham Norton show. Even if they aren’t overly concerned what is expected of them, they are clearly comfortable in the spotlight. Gary, though, says that they felt after the Olympics that they should grasp the opportunity to promote their sport.
‘After the Olympics, we were given a great opportunity to promote rowing. We had actively tried to promote it before the Olympics, going around to the kids in schools around our local town and rowing club but after Rio we had a bigger window to promote the sport and tried to take advantage of that as much as we could,’ he says.
‘But we knew too that if we got so distracted by that, that it would take from our rowing. Now we have to manage it. Our target is to win medals, gold medals preferably. If we have opportunities outside of that to promote rowing and do bits like this, that’s great, it’s a win-win. It’s about managing it, capitalising on those opportunities but also staying good and healthy and fast.’
Paul’s suggestion to a live television audience at the time that the brothers just get in the boat and ‘pull like a dog’ got plenty of air-play but it over-simplified a very technical sport.
‘Yeah, we probably over-simplified the technique a bit with terms like that,’ Paul admits. ‘There is a lot involved, but after 17 years you don’t even have to think about it at this stage, it just happens.’
In the brothers’ minds, it is only natural that they would be faster now than they were in Rio. They are two more years down the track, two more years of competing at the very top.
‘It’s a combination of everything,’ Gary reckons. ‘You do more rowing which makes you stronger and fitter and the more rowing you do the more practice you have at the technique. And we have two extra years of knowledge and understanding and learning done about every aspect of our lives, not just in the boat, but everything that we do out of the boat that helps us go faster in the boat.’
Even though they are now considered the best lightweight crew in the world, and among the favourites for gold in Tokyo, they haven’t even qualified for the Olympics yet. That will only happen when they defend their title at the world championships in Austria next September.
And while Rowing Ireland’s High Performance programme are already putting plans into place for the Games, the brothers say they are not thinking about it until they qualify.
‘It’s not like I am going around, chanting in my head, “Tokyo, Tokyo, Tokyo”,’ Gary smiles. ‘It is about what I can do today to make us go faster, what I can do tomorrow to make us go faster. I will think about Tokyo when we qualify.’