Fit for anything — the medical team keeping Ireland's Olympians at peak health
James O'Donovan, Chief Medical Officer for Paris 2024 Olympics, at the National Sports Campus, Dublin. Photo: Gareth Chaney
Staying fit and healthy is the main priority for Team Ireland in the weeks ahead. The 122 athletes representing us at the Paris Olympic Games need to be at their physical and mental peak if they want to reach their full potential at the moment it matters most.
It is Dr James O’Donovan’s job to help them do just that. As the Chief Medical Officer (CMO) for Team Ireland, he and Dr Jim Clover, Dr George Fuller, Dr Stuart O’Flanagan, Dr Valerie Hayes, Dr Louise O’Connell, and Dr Ronan Kearney are responsible for looking after these athletes’ medical needs. Over the course of the games, they will be on call, attending to every illness and injury, major or minor.
Just as Ireland’s athletes are preparing themselves for the physical and mental challenges of the Games, O’Donovan is making sure that he and his team of doctors are ready for whatever lies ahead.
There are lots of logistics to consider. “We must decide where each doctor will be at each moment of every day of the Olympics,” he says. “This involves identifying the higher-risk events and planning how we will move our doctors from event to event as they are needed. We also have to go through all the possible scenarios, from what happens if an athlete needs to go to hospital to what we’ll do if there’s an emergency evacuation. We need to do this for each venue and each sport so that we have a plan of action no matter what happens.”
O’Donovan has already had several meetings with officials in Paris: “These meetings covered how medical services would be delivered at the games and what the challenges were likely to be."
All of this groundwork has to be balanced with making time to attend to the needs of Team Ireland. “The athletes can contact us 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and our doctors have a rota so that each of us does our shift,” says O’Donovan. “This is as important for us as it is to our athletes as it builds our familiarity with them and makes us more aware of issues that might be likely to bother them. We’re also screening the athletes at the moment to help us learn more about them and pre-empt anything that might cause problems later on.”
Ultimately, his goal is for the athletes not to have any health concerns so that they can focus all of their efforts on their performance: “They have put in phenomenal efforts to get to these games. Our job is to prevent them from picking up any knocks, blows or viruses that might take from their ability to perform at their best.”
He is drawing on his previous experience of working at the Tokyo and Rio Games to put precautions in place to protect the athletes. “We know that when travelling as a team, skin, respiratory and gastrointestinal problems can arise,” he says. “That’s why several of our medics have a general practice background.”
O’Donovan and his team of doctors are also familiar with the types of acute injuries that athletes are prone to sustaining when they push their bodies to their physical limits: “Muscle and ligament strains are probably the most common. Different sports take a different toll on different body parts. In swimming, it’s commonly the upper limb around the shoulder. In running, it’s the leg muscles. We work with multi-disciplinary teams and physiotherapists to help manage these injuries.”
Heat is likely to pose a particular problem in Paris. The Sports Ireland Institute has developed a purpose-built heat chamber to help address this and the athletes are already using it to acclimatise to higher temperatures.
O’Donovan and his team are too. “We need to ready ourselves for working in the heat,” he says.
O’Donovan is passionate about his work. He enjoys the collaboration it involves. “Our doctors work with a multi-disciplinary team of physiotherapists, nutritionists, sports performance psychologists and other professions and we all make decisions together,” he says.
He enjoys the variety that comes from dealing with different sports, each of which has its own requirements, injury profiles and challenges.
Best of all, there’s the satisfaction that comes working with the athletes. “We have such remarkable athletes taking part in this year’s Olympic Games and to be even a small cog in the wheel of their journey is such a privilege,” he says.
As the excitement ramps up in the coming weeks, O’Donovan will remain focused on the athletes’ needs. He will also work on building his physical fitness as well as that of his team of doctors. “Moving around an Olympic village requires a high step count and I’ve been working steadily on building mine up over the past year,” he says.
“I think it’s important that we’re physically fit so that we can provide optimal care to our athletes over the course of the games.”
Mental preparation is also key. “Experienced medics will know that it’s important that we pace ourselves throughout the games,” says O’Donovan. “We need to keep ourselves as fresh as possible to deal with issues on the last day as well as we did on the first. We also have to remain objective when dealing with athletes’ highs and lows. Even though we’re bound to have some emotional empathy with athletes we’ve been working alongside for the past few years, we have to stay on an even keel when making our medical decisions. It’s in the best interest of the athletes and of Team Ireland.”
Overall, O’Donovan is primed for Paris: “We’ve worked hard to pre-empt as many things as we can and taken steps to prevent any potential problems. Our athletes can be assured that they have enormous experience and expertise supporting them from our multi-disciplinary team. We hope this will be a memorable Olympic Games for Team Ireland.”
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