WEIGHTLIFTER SHANE ROCHE has incrementally colonised the garage of the family home in Blarney, Co. Cork, and converted it into a personal gym.

“It’d be morning time, he’d drop 180kg on the floor,” laughs his father, Michael Roche. “‘BOOM!’

“Our bedroom is only six or seven feet away. You’d be there like, ‘F…ING HELL, what was tha– oh, it’s only Shane.’

“I swear to God, one of these days a tractor will drive through the house and myself and my wife, Lorraine, will go back to sleep thinking, ‘It’s only Shane.’”

But Michael and Lorraine Roche are happy — relatively, anyway — to get the occasional land in the morning if it means supporting their son on the long road to Los Angeles 2028.

They know the story because they have already written a version of it: Michael was Irish boxing’s sole representative at the 2000 Olympics in Sydney, a blundering time for the sport in this country sandwiched between the glories of Barcelona ’92 and the most recent 15 years of unprecedented international success.

Michael did it the hard way and his Sydney dream-turned-nightmare, achieved and endured amid institutional shambles, proved cause for change: he was the last boxer to represent Ireland at the Olympics before the inception of the IABA’s High Performance Unit and, relatedly, he was the last boxer to make it to the Olympics without a red cent of state funding.

Shane, too, will have to do it the hard way if he is to become his family’s second Olympian. But he will equally do it his own way, all the while trying to light the beacons for weightlifting as it begins the next stage of its development in Ireland.

“My dad never put me into boxing because of the expectations that might have come with that given his own career,” says Shane, taking time out from a training session at Cork Weightlifting Club.

“I was aware that he had gone to the Olympics but I probably wasn’t aware of the gravity of that. It wasn’t a huge sporting household because I’m an only child and my dad never pushed sports on me because he didn’t want to be putting pressure on me to be living up to him as an athlete. He really just let me do whatever I wanted, and whatever I enjoyed with my friends.

“I kind of found my own thing and found expectations for myself in another sport. I actually came in here from soccer after getting an injury, just for rehab. And after a couple of months, I just fell in love with it. And I actually don’t know what it is about it!” he laughs. “Because it’s the same thing every day… It’s not easy, like: it’s hard work every single day.

“I think it’s just that you can actually see the constant progression, you can see what you need to in order to get better.”

Shane’s girlfriend, Ailbhe Mulvihill, 23, also trains out of Cork Weightlifting Club.

Ailbhe was part of a five-person team who represented Ireland at the European Junior and U23 Championships in Durres, Albania last month, along with Shane, Eoin Kealy, Gillian Barry, and Emma Dungan.

Partly inspired by her brother, she first tried weightlifting because she had to take on a new sport for Gaisce in fifth year of school. Like Shane, she found the barbell a perfect fit. And, like Shane, it was an injury suffered in another sport — Gaelic football, in which Ailbhe represented her native Westmeath throughout her teens — that sparked her full-time pivot to the gym.

“There’s just something about the sport,” Ailbhe says. “I think, as well as what Shane said, there’s a really, really nice community of weightlifters in Ireland and they’re all really supportive. They’re all really like-minded people.

“We all want the same thing, everyone pushes each other on.”

“It’s not a massive community, either,” Shane adds, “but all of the people in it, we all do get on really well. Like, you couldn’t come into the gym every day and train by yourself: that’d actually be horrible!

“Like, during lockdown, trying to train by yourself and keep motivation up was terrible,” he laughs. “There’s an accountability, I suppose, when you’re showing up every day with your friends. They’ll push you.”

“It’s funny seeing my parents, my grandparents, trying to learn about the sport as well,” smiles Ailbhe, who competed in the women’s -56kg category in the U23s last month. “You can see them trying to be as supportive as they can.

My grandad will be like, ‘And what weight are ya liftin’ now?’ Like, he doesn’t understand the different lifts that are involved and he might ask me, ‘What are ya deadliftin’? What are ya squattin’?’ So, instead of trying to explain it, I just show my grandparents videos. And if I’m going out to an international competition, my uncle will come out to them and show them a livestream.

“Same as my dad, I suppose, like,” Shane says. “He had no idea what it was when I was getting into it but he’s after getting to know what all of the lifts are. For me, like. It’s great. He’s very supportive that way.

“My grandparents on his side are no longer with us but the amazing thing is that my grandad on his side used to do weightlifting in the army, and I only found that out two years into the sport when I went to my first competition.

“There’s an old weightlifter, he’s 78, his name is Billy Cabal. He used to lift with my grandad in the Munster Open. Obviously, it skipped one generation!”

“Those ones are funny, like,” Ailbhe says. “My [maternal] grandad has been gone since I was eight or nine but even my mom was telling me that every time the Olympics would come around, the weightlifting was the one sport that he wanted to watch. He was never alive to see me doing weightlifting and I never knew weightlifting was something that he was interested in watching, but somehow it resonated with both of us.”

Shane smiles: “I think maybe the same way as people, for some reason, like to watch other people punch each other in the face in boxing, they also just like to watch people lift really heavy things.”

Mind, it’s just as well that both athletes share their respective grandfathers’ passions to such a feverish extent. Theirs remains a sport in which the participants must do a lot of heavy lifting outside of the gym, too.

Weightlifting Ireland doesn’t yet have a High Performance Unit and so it receives only €30,000 annual funding from Sport Ireland. Consequently, Irish weightlifting clubs and their athletes and coaches typically raise their own funds in order to compete at international tournaments, with the national governing body doing its best to reduce those costs as far as is feasible.

For example, at last month’s Europeans, Weightlifting Ireland paid for the first three nights’ bed and board; the athletes paid for the other four, as well as for their flights.

“You’re talking about the bones of a grand — each — just to be able to do what we actually qualified to do, if that makes sense,” Shane says. “We qualified to represent Ireland at the European Championships but it’s expensive to actually compete.

“Weightlifting Ireland don’t have the resources now but maybe when people see our progression, they might be able to secure more funds and push them into younger generations.”

A thousand euro is a lot of money for most people, not to mention for Shane, a 20-year-old Chemical Physics student who can squeeze in only 12 or 13 hours’ part-time work per week on top of his 28 hours of college and 20 hours of elite training.

“It’s demanding but I just have to manage my time… and suffer!” he shrugs.

Ailbhe, meanwhile, is 23 and only a couple of months ago qualified as a chartered physiotherapist.

“I found it particularly difficult during my final year to balance work, college and training,” she explains. “Obviously, college and training were my biggest priorities so even trying to juggle those two, part-time work just took a complete backseat. I was lucky enough that my parents helped me to manage but there’s only so long that can go on as well.

It’s difficult to see international athletes from other countries who have weightlifting as their full-time pursuit that they can dedicate basically their whole lives to. But the more we improve, the more weightlifting will be recognised in Ireland, we hope.

Shane’s Olympian father, Michael, insisted that he keep to a minimum his own contributions to this article: “I had my time,” the former five-in-a-row Irish-champion boxer stressed.

But the Fairhill man is insistent, too, that young weightlifters such as Shane, Ailbhe, and future national-team competitors be provided with the optimal conditions to equally have theirs.

“I’m not trying to step on anyone’s toes”, he says, “but they need to be getting more out of it.

“In boxing, we never had to pay for our flights or accommodation, for example. It was always a given.

If I did it the hard way before the High Performance and funding and all that, people like Shane and Ailbhe are doing it the harder way — and that’s wrong, in my opinion. It shouldn’t have to be like this in an Olympic sport, 22 years down the road from when I was an Olympian, when there is so much funding available now.

Shane leaves home in the mornings at 6:30 to go to work, then college, then training. He’s not back home until 10pm. He’s training as an elite athlete while juggling work and college. He’s representing his country in elite competition but he’s paying to be there. It’s 30 years on from my generation but nothing has really changed in some sports even with the National Lottery Grants.

Michael Roche (red) fighting John Duddy in 2001. Lorraine O'Sullivan / INPHO Lorraine O'Sullivan / INPHO / INPHO

Two of Michael’s friends, former Ireland head coach Billy Walsh and Irish sport’s ‘Godfather of High Performance’, Gary Keegan, have expressed to him a willingness to assist with the creation of a Weightlifting Ireland High Performance Unit should the time come that the sport’s governing body decides to move in that direction.

And he hopes that such a time won’t be long coming, so that weightlifting can command more funding from Sport Ireland and, in turn, ease the burden on its current Olympic-chasing competitors and the families doing their best to keep their dreams alive.

“Obviously, myself and Lorraine will do our best to support Shane,” Michael says. “I’m very lucky that I’ve had a job with Pfizer — and now Viatris, one of its legacy divisions — for the last 23 years. Listen, I do the best I can for him.

“But not every athlete’s parents will be that lucky and, obviously, you can’t do that forever, either.”

The sport of weightlifting in Ireland is undoubtedly enjoying a rapid growth spurt. Few are better positioned to measure that first-hand than Shane Roche and Ailbhe Mulvihill’s trainer at Cork Weightlifting Club, and Weightlifting Ireland coach Mike O’Leary.

O’Leary, a rugby man originally who also currently runs S&C with AIL Division 2A side Dolphin, has been a trainer for 16 years, the last eight of which have been spent in Cork WC’s impressive Marina Commercial Park premises. He recently had to restructure the coaching regime in the gym so as to ensure that the huge influx of new members were receiving sufficient one-on-one attention.

He also had to independently raise funds, along with Shane, to ensure that they could travel to last year’s European Juniors in Rovaniemi, Finland.

Weightlifting is getting there, O’Leary says. It’s just not quite there yet.

“Even the popularity we’ve seen around Cork recently: it’s exploding now. But it is still tiny relative to other sports. And then you’re looking at high performance and putting these structures in place; and it’s all well and good to set it up using the models of rugby or boxing or whatever it may be — but you’ll fairly quickly realise that with weightlifting, that same approach isn’t going to work.

“It’s a case of it being slow, monotonous, and we’re definitely facing in the right direction but the path isn’t quite there yet, y’know?

Next year will be a big year. We’re putting a lot of things in place — like a coaching committee where we’ll at least know that an athlete is being taken care of; where, no matter what happens, we know that an athlete is being looked after in all scenarios. So, if they want to go to the Olympics, we have a coach that’s helping them on that path; so we have a team looking after European- or world-standard athletes; so that we have a team looking after Juniors and U23s and U17s where, at that youth phase — and especially with the female athletes — you need to give them structure before they decide, ‘I’ve no interest anymore’.

“So, there have been huge positive steps but there are still miles to go,” O’Leary smiles. “It’d be pointless saying it to you any other way.”

Ailbhe Mulvihill with Cork Weightlifting Club coaches Michael O'Leary (R) and Roland Korom (L).

Shane and Ailbhe are far from resigned to it, but they are cognisant of the possibility that they and their peers may wind up being the Michael Roches of weightlifting: the last athletes to ‘go it alone’ with minimal financial assistance from official channels.

At the very worst, as Shane sees it, they will raise the bar to the extent that the sport can’t remain an afterthought in Ireland.

“I think people like us, we’re the building blocks, going to internationals,” says the 96/102kg national record holder. “Over the last decade or so, people haven’t been going to these major international competitions. It’s just starting to take off and the better we get, the more Sport Ireland might look at it and think, ‘Oh, that’s a high-performance sport, we should start funding it more.’

“Even looking at it now”, adds Ailbhe, who herself holds three Irish U23 records, “the likes of Shane and myself and all the other athletes at the Europeans: when we were at the development stage, there wasn’t as many resources within Weightlifting Ireland as we have now.

And now we can see younger athletes in that developmental stage going off to developmental international competitions which we didn’t have the opportunity to do years ago. And it’s a pity that it wasn’t there for us but it’s great to see that it’s there now. It’s almost bittersweet to see how much the sport is growing while knowing it would have been great if we had some of those resources as well.

“I think that’ll be the way the whole way through, as well, like,” Shane replies. “We’ll set the standards for the people below us and when they’re coming up through the system, there’ll be more there for them and they’ll actually be able to see a path in terms of where they can go.”

So, ostensibly, both athletes are breaking national records so that future competitors can lift those records away from them?

“They can try, anyway, yeah!” Shane nods.

An Instagram post by Ailbhe (@ail.mulvihill).

In the meantime, he and Ailbhe must plot a previously uncharted course in the direction of the 2028 Olympics.

Weightlifting has not been included on the initial slate for Los Angeles ’28 because its international federation has failed to suitably address the International Olympic Committee’s concerns over bribery and doping. There remains hope, however, that this can be amended in time for last call in 2023.

Theoretically for the moment, qualification for the Los Angeles Games would begin in 2026, a year in which Shane should be entering the prime age for a male weightlifter and when Ailbhe could be bang on it for a female competitor.

They are the co-authors of their own story but even in its early chapters, Shane makes no bones about the fact that he takes creative inspiration from the tales with which he grew up.

“Oh, my dad is very good. I’d often sit down with him and have a chat with him over the weekend. If things aren’t going right, he’ll… kind of just put me back on the right path, y’know?

Everything I do in terms of weightlifting, I do it for myself. But I also love doing it for him. I’d love to just, like… not be him, but do everything he’s done — just my own way.

“The Olympics is the pinnacle for both Ailbhe and me, now,” Shane adds. “It’d be… Not pointless, but considering the amount of time and effort we put into this, the Olympics will always cross your mind even if it’s a bit down the line for us.

“It’ll probably take a lot of self-funding to achieve that dream. It’ll all be on us. I might have to take time off, even, after college. We’ll have to find a way. But the thing is, I’ve seen it done: my dad did it.

“The gates have been opened, like. My dad did it without the funding and in a way, he paved the way for other athletes where the carding system began afterwards.

“If it so happens for us that we get there without that sort of help with funding, grand. We’ll just be able to look back and say we did it too.”