THERE ISN’T MUCH time for lightweight rowers to feel the nerves rising up on the morning of a race.
There’s the weigh-in two hours before the race, meaning a quick check on the scales is required just after waking up. Olympic lightweight double champions Paul O’Donovan and Fintan McCarthy aim to be slightly over the limit so they can sweat off the excess before the race begins. Food. Drink. Race gear on. Apply sunscreen. Warm up. Go time!
“There’s a short enough time to eat and drink and rehydrate,” O’Donovan explains of their hectic itinerary during a round-table discussion alongside McCarthy at the National Rowing Centre in Cork.
They will be leading an Ireland rowing squad of 16 athletes across seven boats in the French capital.
O’Donovan is just over a month away from his third Olympics. His debut in Rio eight years ago yielded silver alongside his brother Gary, Ireland’s first-ever rowing medal at the Games. McCarthy was his partner for Tokyo when they upgraded the boat to a gold-medal finish.
These days, O’Donovan says he’s feeling “a bit old and creaky”. It’s hard to tell though, whether he says that in jest or as a nod to a real sense of fatigue. At times when he’s addressing the media pack, his palms open up to reveal the blisters that all rowers can relate to. They’re caused by the friction of clutching the oars, and the only way to cure them is to form a callous and make an ally of the pain. O’Donovan’s blisters are years in the making. He’s been in the water a long time.
And yet, he’s already planning for life after lightweight rowing is removed from the Olympic schedule. Continuing with the sport for him will mean rowing in the heavyweight class. He made his debut at the European Championships where he started with a third-place finish [6:58.07] in the single sculls. He then won a repechage to advance to the semi-finals where he crossed the line in fifth place after his boat capsized.
There’s no weighing-in involved with heavyweight rowing, making it a more open event. The rowers are naturally bigger athletes, but that’s not something that discourages O’Donovan from the transition.
“The thing is,” O’Donovan begins, “most of the guys you’re racing there are very big and tall and have long levers, big engines and stuff, which is a little bit more conducive to going fast for rowing than being a bit smaller and shorter. But it’s not totally insurmountable.
“We could put on a few kilos of weight but probably wouldn’t put on a huge amount anyway and even at the minute we’re not too far off the pace of the double so a lot of the time when we race our heavyweight men’s double in training pieces, they’re up there consistently winning medals in that and it’s kind of 50/50 between us who wins the pieces in the training sessions, so at the minute we’re kind of there or thereabouts.”
McCarthy has been contemplating the switch as well, and stresses that heavyweight rowing is not simply about piling on the weight. Power takes precedence over just sheer size. But his main focus is Paris for now and “just trying to get through this Olympics in one piece.”
McCarthy went out to the Vaires-sur-Marne Nautical Stadium last October, sampling the Olympic venue where he and O’Donovan will hope to defend their gold medal. Conditions were a “bit windy,” he found, but nothing that they won’t encounter during a training camp in Banyoles of Spain ahead of the Olympics which they are attending at the moment.
While the duo have clocked up lots of miles in the boat together, they’ve had some time apart in more recent times. McCarthy missed the European championships this year due to illness, and throughout 2022 and 2023, he spent a lot of time in a single boat. He feels both rowers benefited from that arrangement, bringing him closer and closer to race pace.
On the days when they do compete together, there isn’t much communication between them in the boat. McCarthy will only ever speak if he feels the words are necessary.
“I guess if something comes over me sometimes I’ll say ‘come on’ or ‘this is good’ or something like that. We’ve kind of, I guess, not perfected but we know how we race and how to get the most out of ourselves individually in the boat.
“I know a lot of people slate us for our technique sometimes. We maybe do do things a bit differently but I think that’s actually really good that we’re not listening to what is the done thing or the tradition. Someone said we were a bit agricultural before, I can’t remember who. Dominic, our coach, slates us every day as well!
“But most of the time we’re focusing on riding that red line and not going too hard or too easy.”
Riding that line takes on different forms for O’Donovan and McCarthy. It means conserving energy in races where qualification is already assured and tapering back makes more sense than increasing the stroke count. It also means reading the movements of the other rower and responding in kind when they increase their effort. Balance the boat by balancing the output.
“I guess it’s not really about hitting it, you’re trying to ride it the whole way down and not go too far past because if that happens then you’re obviously dust.”
Consistency is the key trait that comes to mind when O’Donovan is asked for McCarthy’s main contribution to the ship. There’s a confidence in the way he rows too, which was perhaps not all that apparent when he first sat into the boat. O’Donovan could sense a feeling of self-doubt in his rowing partner during those early stages.
“Should I be here at all?” he adds.
But as the results came in to strengthen McCarthy’s claim, the self-belief naturally grew. He’s well equipped to articulate an opinion now, and perhaps even challenge the views of the more senior rower beside him.
“I was obviously quite new to the senior level at that time,” McCarthy says, remembering those early days when he was finding his way in the water at this level. “When it came to racing, not just with Paul but against the other crews, they would’ve been people that I would’ve been watching for years as well so from that side of things, you can feel a bit imposter-ish.
“But I guess over the last few years, there’s been new people coming up and it’s just who we race all the time now. So that’s one side of it and then just through getting quicker and getting stronger and faster, you prove to yourself over a number of years that you’re good enough to be there.”
O’Donovan and McCarthy took bronze at World Cup II in Lucerne last month, which was their first competitive race of the season. The Irish crew were in second place for the first 1,000 metres, with no more than 0.3 of a second separating them from Switzerland’s Jan Schaeuble and Raphael Ahumada.
The Italian crew of Gabriel Soares and Stefano Oppo Jan Schaeuble eventually won, coming in just over a second ahead of the third-placed Skibbereen pair.
A tight competition, O’Donovan concedes, is certainly good for rowing as an event. That’s especially true with the Olympics looming, the blue ribbon piece where the maximum number of eyes will be on the sport. But it won’t impact their plan for Paris. And with another suite of busy race days to occupy them in their quest to defend their gold medal, there really isn’t much time for anything else.
“We’re going to try and be the best that we can in Paris anyway and hopefully that’ll be enough,” says O’Donovan. “But at the same time, it looks good for the event that there are a load of crews that are all really close together. It makes it quite competitive which makes the racing a bit more exciting as well so it’s something we’ll be looking forward to.”
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