THE COUNTDOWN IS on for Ellen Keane.
This summer’s Paralympic Game will be her fifth and final. She is planning to retire after Paris 2024, and right now, there are no ifs, buts or maybes in her mind.
Two months out, how is she feeling?
“Jeez like… I guess the spark of the Games isn’t as bright maybe for me as it would be for the younger ones,” Keane tells The 42.
“I don’t think I’ll fully realise it until maybe August, when we go off on our holding camp or when club finishes.
“I am very set in my decision. It’s making sure I don’t drop off, and making sure I am staying present. There’s definitely nothing that will keep me but yeah, I’m excited.”
She’s only 29 — “still quite young,” the Dubliner admits — but it has been a very long road.
The prospect of a less daunting three-year cycle, rather than four, ultimately kept her after Tokyo, where she won gold in the SB8 100m Breaststroke. (She took bronze in 2016.)
“I’d say physically, my body could probably keep going, but five Games is a lot for anyone mentally,” Keane says. “I wouldn’t want to go to LA and just be there for the sake of it.
“I want to still be able to give a good performance and that’s what I’m trying to do with Paris. It’s probably harder than I thought it would be.
“Mentally, it is a lot harder. When I go away competing, or when I go away on camps, I never used to get homesick, and now I do. That’s probably the hardest thing for me at the moment because I’m like, ‘I want to go home to my dogs!’
“I’ve seen so many people come and go too. My friends from different countries, there’s less and less of them. You kind of just feel like my generation is kind of ready to move on.”
“I’ve been doing it since I was a kid,” she adds, with motivation ebbing and flowing but certainly proving more difficult with time. “It’s my fifth Games but I’ve also been doing it probably since I was nine years old. Twenty years of the same thing!
“It has been hard and I guess the thing that does keep me kind of motivated is, every Games itself is different. I feel really proud to be able to go to the Paralympics, part of a team that is so strong, and just to see it out — and to see it out in a good position as well is motivating.”
Life after Paris will be strange, to say the least. No more ungodly early starts, no more rigorous, rigid training schedules. Freedom from structure and strictness.
Keane would like to work in media, but isn’t making any rash decisions right now.
A Dancing With The Stars contestant in 2022 and author of ‘Perfectly Imperfect’, the Clontarf native has a sizeable profile from through the years.
She will work through the post-Paralympics publicity with her agent, Sinead Galvin, and then take a well deserved rest. She’s planning a trip to Bali for a yoga teacher training course in November, the perfect opportunity to reset and figure out her next steps.
A very different autumn awaits for Keane, who lives with 1500m Para Athlete Greta Streimikyte.
“I get to make my own decisions,” she enthuses. “I guess that’s one of the things that I kind of do struggle with: I want that control. I want to be able to make those decisions. I want to be able to do all these things, and I can’t really at the moment.
“My friends… I don’t know what it is about people in their 30s just really getting into running and marathons, but they’re all doing it! And I’m like, ‘Ah, that sounds fun. I want to do that,’ but I can’t. I’m just excited to try different things.”
She didn’t really do that last summer when she publicly announced her retirement plan. Keane kept with her usual approach of being open and transparent, sharing her life in and out of the pool on social media, including a recent ADHD diagnosis.
She never even considered staying schtum on her career-ending decision, admitting she is “maybe too much of an open book” but doesn’t want to feel like she is hiding anything.
“I think it was important for me to be so public about it, because I wanted people to know. The Irish people have been great supporters of mine throughout the years and I think it’s nice for them to know when it is time, and so that they can say goodbye with me.”
Keane has had a largely positive experience on social media, but has been the victim of some trolling of her disability on TikTok recently. “Me reading that doesn’t hurt me, but I would worry more about a kid who would read that and then feel that.”
Her role model status sits comfortably mainly — but sometimes uncomfortably.
“I find it very heavy with people’s expectations of me. A lot of people would come to me for answers that I don’t have, or would get frustrated if I can’t reply straight away, or if I don’t have the answers they’re looking for.”
Keane will defend her 100m Breaststroke crown in Paris, while also swimming the 100m Backstroke. Her main event, the former, is on day two, so she wanted a second swim to extend her campaign and detract from the obvious emotion involved.
The last dance.
The long goodbye.
Eyes on the prize.
“A successful Games for me,” Keane concludes, “I’d like to swim around the same time I swam in Tokyo. 1.19 or 1.20, I’d be very happy with that. I’d end on a high with that.”
