Brilliant Rohan bumps up Irish gold medal tally

For five days, Mark Rohan could only look on as the medals were hoarded and the levels of expectation multiplied like ripples in a pond.

By yesterday morning, he was the last of the 49-strong Irish Paralympic team to get a taste of these Games and wheeled his way to the starting ramp in Brands Hatch yesterday afternoon aware that anything less than a gold would be greeted with deflation.

By yesterday evening, he was H1 individual time-trial champion of the world.

This is Rohan’s first Games but he came to them a superstar, a double world hand-cycling champion and a man with a back story that had brought a sponsorship programme with Sky, among others, and a slot in the national consciousness.

“Calm and controlled,” were the last words whispered in his ear by the cycling team’s coach, Brian Nugent, mindful perhaps that his charge will have been energised by the bronze medals claimed less than an hour earlier by his compatriots.

One last deep breath and a puff of his cheeks later and his arms were doing windmills up the first of the circuit’s hills: off on a route that would last 35 minutes and 41.54 seconds and leave clear daylight between him and Israel’s Koby Lion in second place.

“I stayed focused,” he said in one of the countless media interviews after.

“The guys around me kept me focused. With 20 minutes to go to the start, during the warm-up, I could hear Damien and James coming through with a medal and then Fran and Catherine coming through with another one. They inspired me to go on and do what I had to do.

“As the medals kept coming in — once Bethany [Firth] got the first medal — I really, really wanted one of my own. I just kept envisioning myself on the starting ramp and I just concentrated on putting out the watts. Brian came up with a gameplan and it worked perfectly. Three seconds over 40 minutes is absolutely nothing but we came out the right side of it.”

The margin was actually much greater than that, 11 seconds to be precise, but cold statistics do little justice to the effort required of Rohan — who is paralysed from the chest down — and others who were competing in this corner of Kent yesterday without any feeling in their legs.

Rohan said prior to the Games that gradients are twice as difficult for hand-cyclists as for their counterparts whose legs rather than their arms are the pistons used to propel them around these parts. At times yesterday, his progress was measurable in mere inches.

The climb from Graham Hill Bend up and around Druid’s Bend was monstrous but Rohan has trained here and has studied the track assiduously for months.

“It’s tough to get it right because you come into [the climb] so fast,” said the 31-year Westmeath man. “You come into it at around 65kph and within 20 seconds you’re down to 9kph. So you have to get the gears right and thankfully we did.

“At that stage on the second lap I was about 10 seconds down so I just had to bury myself. I knew I had it in the tank. But the thing is, you don’t win a gold medal by just crossing the line. Well, some people do. Jason [Smyth] and Michael [McKillop] do. But in hand-cycling you don’t. For most of us, it’s split seconds.”

And he’s not done yet as tomorrow, he will face the same circuit but will traverse it six times rather than just two in the H1 individual road race. 48 kilometres of hell on the back of just 36 hours recovery and, wouldn’t you know it, he can hardly wait.

“As soon as we leave here, I have a recovery session of about 30 or 40 minutes, get food into me, get back to the village and then just chill. It’s hard to celebrate because in 36 hours we’re going to go again and hopefully I can repeat the success of today.”

You wouldn’t dream of betting against it.