CHOPPY WATERS
Canoeist Jenny Egan had been looking forward to 2020 but Covid-19 stalled her Olympic dream and wedding plans while the virus hit close to home by laying low her brother Peter who acts as her coach
‘THIS WAS THE LONGEST I’D BEEN OFF THE WATER SINCE I WAS EIGHT’
THIS was to be a thrilling time of the year for Jenny Egan. At the start of 2020, the months of May and June loomed out of the calendar, outsized targets in fulfilling the ambition that has blazed within her since she was a child.
Were the world in its usual order, May and June would have afforded Egan opportunities to achieve qualification for the 2020 Olympics.
By now, her fate would be known. Those qualifiers would be over and in the happy version of events, she would be less than two months away from becoming an Olympian.
Then the world went haywire, and all kinds of plans and dreams and ambitions were sent toppling.
Misery and sickness and death were visited on families, and fear stalked the land for weeks.
Behind the concerns that everyone shared, though, there were personal stories upended by the Covid-19 chaos.
Jenny Egan is one of those elite athletes who, in other circumstances, might have been anticipating the peak of her career now.
But that was back in the old world.
Now, she has reset her ambitions and is powering onwards – which is apt for a canoeist.
It will be two weeks tomorrow since she was able to return to the water, after weeks of making the best of training on dry land.
‘It’s so great to be back on the water,’ she laughs.
‘I was off it for almost two months, and I haven’t been off the water for that length of time since 2006, when I had glandular fever.
‘Since the age of eight, I’d say this is the longest I’ve been off the water.’
She is back now, training and preparing for a return that, as yet, has no date.
Egan is a full-time athlete and sprint canoe is her discipline, and in 2018 she became the first Irish athlete to win a medal at the world championships.
In the space of a week the following year, she won two World Cup medals.
She has been one of Ireland’s leading international athletes of recent years, and the 33-year-old was feeling good about 2020, the early parts of which she spent training in Florida.
Then the crisis hit.
‘I’d been in Florida for a six-week training camp, and most years I go there to join the Danish women’s canoeing team. I’m very lucky that they are extremely welcoming to me and I have a great relationship with the coach.
‘My plan was, I was coming home for 10 days and then I was going on another three-week training camp to Portugal with the Danish team again.
‘I felt really good, in great shape. Then things escalated very quickly.’
During her last week in America, coverage of the coronavirus story became much more prominent, and she and her Danish colleagues wondered what should they do.
They wondered if it might be best to stay in Florida, forget about Portugal and train where they were for as long as they could. But what if they fell sick? Illness in America can come at a ruinous cost.
‘All these thoughts were out there,’ she says. ‘We decided to go home, and I left a few days before the Danes. When I got home they were still really thinking about staying, and I wondered should I fly back out to them.
‘Then they had to go home, though, because there was talk Denmark might be closing its borders.
‘I was trying to think what was the best solution, but within a few days things changed really drastically.
‘In the space of a week or two competitions began to get postponed and cancelled, and it all happened so quickly.
‘Everyone has had to adjust in all walks of life,’ she reasons. ‘You just have to take it day by day and try and stay focused on what you’re doing.
‘Let’s hope in the near future we’re back competing but no one knows when that will be.’
That equanimity is impressive, but it is also informed by close experience of the effects of Covid-19. Egan’s brother, Peter, is also a high-calibre canoeist who has competed for Ireland internationally.
He was, she says, floored by the virus.
‘Pete is a member of An Garda Síochána, and he probably got it from being out on the frontline, working,’ she explains.
‘He’s super fit, super strong, but people don’t realise it affects those people as well. He was doing fourday-on, four-day-off shifts. He was on his fourth day of working.
‘He was finishing his shift on the Wednesday, having been out training on the Tuesday. On that Wednesday he had a really bad headache and felt really tired.
‘Then on Wednesday evening, into Thursday he got a really high fever and his temperature went through the roof. Thankfully he didn’t have to be hospitalised but he stayed in isolation for over two weeks.
‘His partner was leaving his food outside the bedroom door, I was going to the supermarket doing shopping and leaving it outside the front door and she would come out and take it in.
‘When it hits close to home, it does make you more cautious. This is real.
‘If you know someone that has it, it’s a lot more real.
‘Thankfully he’s back at work, and he’s back doing training, but it took him five or six weeks to recover from it.
‘There are so many different symptoms: he felt so tired, he had a high temperature, a bit of a dry cough, and you know they say your senses of smell and taste can go? They went in him as well.
‘He had to make sure all those symptoms were gone before he could even start thinking about going back to work. But thankfully he’s out the other side of it.’
Jenny Egan is from Lucan in west Dublin, and a member of the Salmon Leap Canoe Club that is based nearby in Leixlip.
Her proximity to the club means she has avoided the frustration of being prevented from returning by the current restriction limiting travel to within five kilometres of a person’s home.
That is a fate that has befallen others with ambitions of qualifying for the Olympics, and is an issue that has been raised by the Olympic Federation of Ireland in recent days.
Its suggestion that the Government exempt any athletes who have qualified for the Olympic Games, or are trying to do, so meets with the enthusiastic support of Egan, who understands how fortunate she is to be back in full training while others must wait.
Her association with canoeing extends back before her birth; her mother, Angie, trained while pregnant with her daughter. That might be reasonably common nowadays but was unheard of then, says her daughter.
Her father, Tom, as well as her brother have a long association with the sport, and those connections have helped as she goes about readjusting her plans for the 2020 Olympics in 2021.
‘My focus (before lockdown) was still on trying to qualify, while athletes who had qualified were solely focused on being in Tokyo this July. It was tough to comprehend because we had done this hard winter of training. And it wasn’t just this year: this is my whole life. I’ve been racing since I was eight years old.
‘It’s a whole life’s worth of work. ‘You have to readjust. Thankfully I’m surrounded by really good friends and family, and I have to thank Salmon Leap Canoe Club, Canoeing Ireland, Sport Ireland and the Olympic Federation of Ireland.
‘They have all be so supportive. You surround yourself with people who will help you through the good and the bad times.
‘It took a bit of time to readjust but we just have to focus on training for now, and hopefully competition in the near future.’
Tentative plans have been made for competitions towards the end of September, but the potential complications that litter the road from here to there mean Jenny Egan is not letting her hopes build.
The enormous dedication to her sporting career has not come at the exclusion of other parts of her life.
She was due to get married at the end of this year.
But just as her professional ambitions, which were meant to be realised in the most exciting way imaginable in Tokyo, have been challenged, so have her wedding plans. The year 2020 could have been a marvellous one. Now, the need to absorb and go again extends into her personal life, too.
‘Jon is my fiancé, and he and my brother are my coaches,’ she says.
‘Jon and I were to get married at the end of this year. He is from the UK, so even if a wedding was to go ahead in Ireland, there is the question of can people travel over for the wedding, because we’ll have a lot of people coming over from the UK.
‘And if it’s not normal circumstances, then we would prefer to postpone it.
‘We don’t know the situation at the moment.’
They will find a way, though.
The resilience of athletes has been talked about a great deal since the Olympics were postponed.
But it is true. They are certainly a durable lot.
That capacity for finding a way around a problem could be very useful to Jenny Egan on a number of fronts in this uncertain year.