It is impossible to sit down for a proper interview with Paul and Gary O’Donovan without them ruining it for everybody else. All this righteous talk of funding and commitment and winning psychology is so gently mocked away as to sound utterly futile. As well it might.
Like isn’t Irish rowing still a little short on funding?
“Sure everyone wants more money really, don’t they?” Paul responds. “Everyone is worried about funding, but we just won the World Championships, so if you threw millions and millions and millions at Gary and I, there’s only a finite amount that we can get back.”
And, says Gary: “When you go all over the world, everyone seems to have similar issues when it comes to funding. We can sit around and moan and cry and complain that we don’t have this, that and the other thing but that’s not going to help us go faster.”
But isn’t it true your boat will be all worn out by Tokyo 2020?
“I don’t know who came out with that,” says Paul. “There’s no truth to that rumour. Our boat manufacturers get myself and Gary a new boat every year, so we’ve not had any worries.
“There is a little bit of funding issues with, say, other people that are coming into the team – the younger, junior, under-23 teams – to make sure that their boats are up to standard as well. Myself and Gary aren’t worried. The main issue is that they can afford to send us all on training camps and get the right support around that kind of area.”
Still isn’t the commitment going further through the roof every year?
“I’ve just started back my studies,” says Paul. “I’m four weeks into that now, graduate entry medicine in UCC. I missed the first two weeks anyway when we were away competing. We do a year and a half of this programme and then join up with the direct entry program when they’re half-way through their third year.”
So studying medicine while preparing for Tokyo?
“I think I should be able to manage it, to be honest. I did quite well with the physio degree, went part-time the year before the Olympics the last time and the year of the Olympics. I’ll do the first year and then see how I get on up to Christmas and I may consider then taking the full year out after that, or just doing the first semester of the second year and then going hard at it then for Tokyo.”
And Gary? “I graduated from CIT last year with a marketing degree so currently I’m just a full-time rower. But if I could get a position or part-time role that would facilitate training, it would be perfect.”
Still winning that gold medal at the World Championships in Plovdiv, surpassing the silver won in Rio, what extra effort did that involve?
“It’s like when you get up in the morning and brush your teeth,” says Gary. “You don’t even think about the motion of it. It’s a bit like that when we sit in the boat.”
Brushing your teeth, really?
Only behind this playful mask are two deadly serious athletes, the O’Donovan brothers speaking in Dublin at the Olympic Federation of Ireland – formerly the Olympic Council of Ireland – announcement of FBD Insurance as their first new sponsor ahead of Tokyo 2020.
There will be a lot of talk of planning and peaking before then, but as far as they’re concerned, it’s just a matter of keep doing what they’re doing.
“We’ve been rowing in boats for 16, 17 years, since 2001,” says Gary. “It’s a combination of everything. You do more rowing which makes you stronger and fitter and the more rowing you do the more practice you have at the technique.
“And we have two extra years of knowledge and understanding and learning done about every aspect of our lives, not just in the boat, but everything that we do out of the boat that helps us go faster in the boat.”
What about the winning psychology in the boat? What do you say to each other?
“No we don’t talk to each other at all,” says Paul. “The last 200m [in Plovdiv], Gary said ‘come on, keep it together . . . ’ or something like that. And my head was starting to roll around then . . . ”
Didn’t Paul start this kind of psychology, with his ‘pull like dogs’ tactic in Rio?
“Yeah, we probably over-simplified a bit with terms like that,” he says, “as a technique. There is a lot involved, but after 17 years you don’t even have to think about it at this stage, it just happens.
“And we do a lot of testing in the lab and on the rowing machine and our scores there have been the best this year than they ever were. We definitely knew coming into the summer, even from April, that we were hitting PBs, then and it was about transferring what we were doing indoors in the lab then to get that performance out of the boat.”
Just beyond the halfway point between Rio and Tokyo, the so-called Olympic cycle is now in its return leg, only too soon to start thinking solely of Tokyo. They’ve got to qualify first, beginning at next summer’s World Championships in Linz, Austria. As great as the gold in Bulgaria was, there’s no disguising their ultimate ambition.
“You go out to try and win every race,” says Gary, “you’d be daft to try and do anything else, but I can’t rank one above the other thing.”
Not even Olympic gold?
“Winning the World Championship is probably a bigger achievement,” says Paul, “but the media makes it out to be such a big thing [Olympics] but the challenge for us is exactly the same thing, it’s the exact same thing, it takes exactly the same amount of effort and training from us to beat them at the World Championships as it does at the Olympics.
And with that he gets a little more serious: “We’re not really doing it for the public or the media or the television, we’re doing it for ourselves, we don’t care what’s written about us if we finish fourth or last or win it. For us we both have college degrees and it’s not going to be the be-all and end-all if we don’t win it. We will have a life after it to move onto.”
And Gary?
“Ah yeah, of course. We’re not going around, chanting in our heads, Tokyo, Tokyo, Tokyo . . . it’s about what I do today and do tomorrow to make myself faster. It is about qualifying first and then thinking about it.”
