Fintan McCarthy fighting far above his weight with rowing's big boys

A year of joy for McCarthy as he steps into a new class. 

PUNCHING ABOVE HIS WEIGHT: At the launch announcing the renewal of McKeever Sports’ partnership with the Olympic Federation of Ireland through to the Brisbane 2032 Olympic Games is Olympic medalist Fintan McCarthy. Pic: ©INPHO/Dan Sheridan

It’s a busy day so Fintan McCarthy sits down for a chat with that enormous smile of his and a plate. White bread. Pure butter. Some sort of relish. Here, you think, is a happy consequence of the Olympic champion’s switch to rowing’s heavyweight ranks.

Years competing at lightweight, where he reigned supreme in the men’s doubles alongside Paul O’Donovan, meant years watching the diet and cutting weight in the run-up to competition. It’s very different now as he goes up against the big boys. Literally.

We’re talking athletes like Simon van Dorp, the Dutch bronze medallist in last year’s Olympic single sculls, who weighs in at over 18 stone and stands close to 6’ 8” tall. A man so freakish he is nicknamed ‘The Experiment’ for all the records he breaks on rowing machines.

The 5’ 8” McCarthy is in supreme nick, but he ain’t no slab of beef.

“As a lightweight, I'd be stepping on the scale the morning of the race as at 69 kilos. This year it's more like 78. A lot of people coming up from the lightweight would have gone a bit more maybe, but I think that's just naturally sort of where I've sat this year.” 

He’ll look at that again over the winter to come, fiddle about with some things and decide whether or not a bit more weight might be a good idea. For now it’s been a case of incremental increases in terms of gym loads and diet and, boy oh boy, has it paid off.

McCarthy has won four medals in this first stab at the heavies.

There was a pair of bronzes, at the Euros and the World Cup regatta in Lucerne, both alongside Konan Pazzaia. He struck gold with Mags Cremen in the World Championship mixed double sculls, and then another bronze in the men’s doubles at the same gig.

That last podium was earned with Philip Doyle, Olympic bronze medallist in the double sculls with Daire Lynch in Paris last year, and a two-time World medallist before he made it a hat-trick with this latest, unlikely, partner in Shanghai last month.

McCarthy’s seamless shift up from lightweight is only one of the remarkable aspects to all this. The pair have known each other for years but the first time they got in a boat together was this time last year when they had a few hours to kill in training.

The second time they rowed as a team was in the national championships, which went well enough to suggest this was something worth pursuing. The third time they got on the water as a double act it delivered that medal in China.

Doyle is the type of man AI might design. The 33-year old with Clark Kent glasses is a good-looking bloke, stands over 6’ 4” and weighs in at well over 14 stones. Look at it this way, his granny used to pick him out of team photos just by his size.

Not anymore. The disparity with McCarthy when they stood on the podium last month was enormous but the reality is that these are two men fighting way above their weight, and that just makes it all the sweeter.

Among the crews they bettered in that World final was Romania’s Olympic champion duo of Andrea Cornea and Marian Enache who expressed shock at the disparity in size between them and Doyle – let alone McCarthy - earlier this year.

“So it was nice to kind of show what we can do,” said the Skibbereen man. “We're brought up to believe in the sport that you need to be these big giants. So the fact that we're kind of representing this and showing what the short guys can do is great.” 

For McCarthy, the whole year has been a joy.

He had spoken after Paris about trying something new for the first year of this LA cycle. Nothing drastic, just a change of scenery or something. The process of adapting to this new category has been all that and more.

Festooned in medals he might be but he has always loved the process of training and tweaking things to see what works and what doesn’t. That’s multiplied the last 12 months or so and he has loved every minute of it.

There was a period after Lucerne where some fatigue crept in and he toyed with the idea of pulling the shutters down on his season but he couldn’t. Not when he was having this much fun.

And the really exciting part to all of it is that he sees much more room for improvement.

“Like, we had a nice year of kind of just playing around: different partners, different boats, different categories, ended up doing the trials. That's how me and Phil got put together.

“From there, I just said, ‘might as well see what we can do in the time we have’. It was really worthwhile because we learned a lot for the coming years, which is where it's really going to be important.”