This Much I Know: Deirdre Duke, Irish Women’s Hockey Olympian

"It was so good to be able to continue to train and, because we’re so close as a team, that I was actually able to see all my friends."

Sat, 17 Jul, 2021 - 06:00

Jennifer Stevens

I suppose when the 2020 Olympic Games were postponed it was pretty bizarre. It was kind of like falling off a cliff. You’re training full-on, getting ready for the biggest event of your sporting life and then suddenly, we had a few months off. Our programme had been quite intense, so we had a pretty brief period of game time for about two months, and then just started to ramp back up again over June, July, August last year, and then since September, we’ve been training flat out as a squad again.

The last year hasn’t been too bad because during all the lockdowns, as elite athletes, we were allowed to continue to train. It was actually, and I know it probably sounds really weird, but it was just great to have an outlet. When so many people weren’t able to exercise or get into the gym, we were still together three or four times a week.

It was so good to be able to continue to train and, because we’re so close as a team, that I was actually able to see all my friends. We felt pretty grateful to be able to do that, but nobody really spoke about the Olympics as such. We didn’t talk about whether it actually might go ahead again. It was this unsaid elephant in the room for the last nine or 10 months. Our coach would address it but just to say that we just had to be ready if it happens.

That was the attitude, but amongst the girls, it was like you just had to pretend, to convince yourself that it was going to go ahead. The training can be pretty gruelling, even without all this, so we just had to trick ourselves into thinking that it was definitely going to happen, and then it was easier to get on with the job.

To be honest, from the team’s point of view, we were never not going. Even when my family and my close friends would be like, ‘Oh, it’s looking really good now. The closer it gets, it’s definitely going to go ahead’. I would be kind of looking at them strangely and say, ‘Oh, I didn’t realise that it wasn’t going to happen’.

It might seem like quite a naive way to think about it, but I suppose to be able to get through the dark mornings and all those storms in January and February, you kind of just have to pretend to yourself that there’s an end goal that you’re working towards. That way, we knew that when it did come around, we would be ready, but it never really entered our consciousness that it wasn’t going to happen, as naïve as that might sound from the outside.

A lot of the women on the team, myself included, are putting our professional careers on hold for another year, and I think that was the biggest thing that we had to get our heads around when the games were cancelled last year.

The Olympics can be a natural endpoint for a lot of people in their sporting careers because it only comes around every four years, so there were definitely some members of the team that were going to reassess their professional career after 2020. The postponement of the games meant that they would have to come back to the hockey pitch for another 12, 13, 15 months, and that was probably the biggest thing that some of the players had to get their head around.

When you’re employed, it can be hard to say to your boss that you need to take a couple of months off, especially for something that may or may not happen, like qualifying for the Olympics. There is funding and we get card money but it’s not enough to live on and the amount depends on your stage in life. So a lot of us have part-time jobs to sustain us. I did law but I work in admin now. You definitely do put your career on hold to work towards going to the Olympics.

We’re played at a European tournament in June and on July 9 last, we went to our host city which is in a place called Owase in Northern Japan. We’ll be there for another week and then we head down to Tokyo to the Olympic Village itself.

This is the first time that the Irish women’s team have actually qualified. My family are over the moon. I guess it’s been a long road. I got my first Irish cap eight years ago so it’s just a culmination of so many years of working towards this.