Emma Duffy

WE’RE DOING FOUR or five hours on the bike most days. Sometimes it’s really tough and you’re exhausted, but when you’re on the tandem with your pilot, and you’re moving that bike together, there’s just no better feeling, especially on the road.

When you have that efficiency of moving the bike together, it’s just incredible. It goes so fast and it’s such a thrill. You’re just doing it with your power, you’re both pushing that bike, it’s just an unbelievable feeling.

I’m privileged and lucky to do that. I know it won’t be forever, so I’m just making the most of it every day and enjoying it.

- Katie-George Dunlevy, July 2024

Athletes are often at their most interesting when they talk about the basics, the love they have for their sport, and how it makes them feel.

Forget medals and success, impact and legacy, highs and lows; it’s that feeling of being a kid again, falling in love with their chosen discipline over and over. The freedom, the fury, and the fantasy.

Katie-George Dunlevy often strips it right back to that.

The Para cycling legend has done it all and won it all at 43, but that love and enjoyment endures.

Dunlevy stressed that as she spoke to The 42 a couple of weeks out from her fourth Paralympic Games this summer.

“It’s really hard to qualify for a Games,” she said. “To go to one is brilliant, and to be successful tops it. Going to a fourth Games is really special. I can’t quite believe it sometimes.

“As your career goes on, you have to sacrifice a lot, you question why you are still doing it, but I just love it. And I love racing. I’m lucky to be successful. That’s what spurs me on, I’m so driven.”

Dunlevy went on to win three medals in Paris, bringing her tally to eight, split evenly between gold and silver. Shortly afterwards, she added her 18th and 19th world championship medals, both of those gold, while she also has 27 World Cup medals from a glittering career.

Remarkable longevity, stunning success. From rowing for Great Britain as a vision-impaired youngster finding her way, to representing her father’s homeland and the Hills of Donegal, it has been some journey.

It hasn’t been easy, nor has it been 24/7 love and enjoyment. Dunlevy’s drive brings her to the darkest of places. To hell and back.

There are suffering sessions on the turbo trainer: retching, woozy, pedalling until she can’t pedal any more. Being lifted off the bike after winning gold at Clichy-sous-Bois, white as a ghost, bereft of all energy and emotion.

“If I am not in a world of pain and am falling off the bike, I haven’t worked hard enough,” Dunlevy told us afterwards. “It is not glamorous. It is a suffer-fest of a sport.

“After five minutes, you are just suffering. Your body is screaming at you to stop, your lungs are screaming, your legs are screaming. You have foam coming out your mouth, you can’t really hear because it is pain, you are getting more and more tired, more and more fatigued, and you are trying to control the bike.”

2024 was Dunlevy’s best year yet, she declared at the Irish Times Sportswoman of the Year Awards where she was recognised alongside team-mates and pilots Eve McCrystal and Linda Kelly.

Her annual return was made all the more impressive given the setbacks she overcame in preparation for Paris. A shattered collarbone, sustained in a crash in May, almost derailed it all. A virus on the eve of the Games was among the many other challenges.

Dunlevy rose from the ashes to the Paralympic podium once more, first with long-serving pilot McCrystal on the track as one of the most iconic partnerships in Irish sport came to a close with a silver lining, and then twice on the road with Kelly.

The Irish Times Sportswoman of the Year 2024 Team of the Year Award winners: Dunlevy (centre) with Kelly (left) and McCrystal. Tom Maher / INPHO Tom Maher / INPHO / INPHO

She finished with silver, gold, and silver: half of Ireland’s haul at the 2024 Paralympics, and more history as Dunlevy sits alongside Paul O’Donovan as the only Irish athletes to have medalled at three successive Games.

She is unquestionably one of our greatest ever sportspeople, yet unfortunately, won’t make every conversation on the topic. Katie-George won’t be mentioned in the same breath as Katie, Roy, Sonia, Paul or the likes.

As a Para athlete, Dunlevy will never get the full recognition she deserves, but the RTÉ and Irish Times Team of the Year awards were welcome nods this year.

McCrystal hailed her as “the toughest person ever,” while Kelly paid tribute to the duo’s Hall of Fame careers as all three were honoured at the latter ceremony last month.

“I watched Katie and Eve on the telly when they were in Tokyo, I was watching them on the Late, Late Show,” said Kelly. “I was doing my first Rás at the time and I remember thinking, ‘That’s absolutely amazing what they do.’

“I just can’t believe it sometimes, two years later, I have medals here with Katie. She’s just an inspiration to so many people.”

Dunlevy spoke brilliantly about her mission to be just that throughout the year, about wanting to be an example for the next generation, and for vision-impaired women and the LGBTQ+ community in particular.

Her final words in Paris were in that vein, and will live long in the memory.

“I was asked why am I still doing it, why have I still got that drive…

“I think it’s just to kind of give back and inspire the next generation, inspire children. Even my younger self, I didn’t have anybody to look up to, any idols, so if it just inspires any child with vision impairment to just believe in themselves, then that’s my job done.”

Katie-George Dunlevy, one of Ireland’s greatest.