IN those crazy August days in 2016 that changed the lives of Gary and Paul O’Donovan, Paul made an observation that still holds true eight years later.
Having left for the Rio Olympics that summer as two relatively unknown young men from Lisheen, by the time they touched West Cork soil again – with silver medals around their necks – they were national heroes. Irish Olympic legends. Everyone wanted a piece of the new kids on the block. That’s still true now.
‘As we got closer to home the less people cared about the medals and the more they cared about us. The people here are closer to us, they know us and how hard we work, and we like it that way,’ Paul told the Star in 2017, and that connection to home will always be there. It’s in his DNA. No matter the heights he hits, West Cork will always be home.
It’s why Paul, now a three-time Olympic medallist – including back-to-back gold in Tokyo and Paris – and seven-time world champion, has always made time for the West Cork Sports Star Awards. These awards recognised him before he changed the Irish sporting landscape, and these awards still celebrate his achievements – and when Paul learned he was in line to add to his record haul of West Cork Sports Star Awards, a Monday night at the Celtic Ross Hotel in Rosscarbery was marked into his diary.
‘The best of support, you wouldn’t get it anywhere else,’ Paul said, after he accepted his NINTH monthly award since 2013, and he has also won the overall award THREE times too. The most successful local athlete in the history of these awards.
This was also an opportunity for Paul, now 30 years old and wiser to the world than the younger version that burst on the scene in 2016, to highlight how his rise to greatness in Irish sport is rooted in West Cork. It’s where it all began, and lessons learned in Skibbereen Rowing Club have shaped his life.
‘What’s really good about it, and we see it in the rowing club, from the founding members through to my dad teaching us how to row, then there is Dominic Casey and now you have other people involved, like Denise (Walsh) as head coach, they all try to keep the concept simple and keep making progress,’ Paul explains.
‘Obviously they are trying to get as much success as they can and trying to teach the kids good lessons about hard work and applying themselves, be open to making mistakes and then correcting them and improving them, and always looking to get better.
‘If people can take that to as many aspects of their life as they can, I think they’re going to be really good people in general which is probably the most important thing that sport can do for a person. It’s not about how many medals or the success you’ve had, it’s about the friends you’ve made, the journeys you’ve had and the life lessons, and bringing them all together for the other parts of your life.’
Olympian and world rowing champion Paul O’Donovan with his latest West Cork Sports Star monthly award.(Photo: Martin Walsh)
There are many pieces to the jigsaw that is Paul, Ireland’s most successful athlete and the first Irish sportsperson to win medals at three different Olympic Games, and his upbringing in West Cork is central to his success. So too is his enjoyment of rowing that can be traced back to the very start when his dad Teddy, himself a former rower with Skibbereen Rowing Club, introduced his two sons to the sport. Add in school friends Shane O’Driscoll and Diarmuid O’Driscoll, and the divilment was high.
‘It’s still as much fun. We’d some great times back then, and still do now,’ Paul says, taking the opportunity to revisit those early rowing memories. As kids, those battles on the River Ilen as the young quartet chased the club’s established rowers, like John Whooley and Kenneth McCarthy, or the original Olympians, Eugene and Richard Coakley and Timmy Harnedy.
‘Dad would say to them “get the lads involved, race them”. There were four of us against them in their singles, and that was what we were excited about,’ Paul says.
‘They would only be down on the weekends because they’d be in college or working or training with the national team during the week. We’d be so excited all week, all motivated to try and do the little things better, racing each other during the week and we’d come together at the weekend to race the older guys.
‘We were getting a little bit closer and then, the four of us in the boat, we eventually passed them. Then we went to double sculls and raced them. It was always that kind of day-to-day stuff, week to week, that kept us motivated to do the training rather than thinking it was all about the long-term. We had some vague idea of where we were going, while not exactly knowing how. Cumulatively, if you do so much of it and are open to learning as well, you’ll start to make progress in the right directions.’
Paul O’Donovan celebrates after winning the lightweight men’s single sculls final at the 2024 World Rowing Championships.
Paul has certainly moved in the right direction, the fastest in the world at moving backwards on water, and his ascendancy to greatness leads to nights like his latest West Cork Sports Star Award presentation and the chance to reconnect with family and friends at home. It’s also the opportunity for those around Paul to show the support that’s been there from the start. Founding club member Richard Hosford made the trip. Club chairman Sean Murran. Violet Hayes. Club captain Seanie O’Brien. They were all there for Paul at the latest celebration of his achievements, and many have been there since the start. And they still care about him more as a person than the medals he’s won. That’s the West Cork that Paul knows and loves.
Paul was presented with a West Cork Sports Star monthly award for August in recognition of his Olympic lightweight men’s double sculls gold medal win alongside Fintan McCarthy, who picked up a monthly award this week too.
