Double delight for Rohan

Mark Rohan shut his eyes tightly and exhaled the deepest of breaths as the first bars of Amhrán na bhFiann swept through the home straight in Brands Hatch and the tricolour was raised in his honour for the second time in three days.

For five years, ever since he bought his first hand-cycling bike, he had worked towards being a double Paralympic gold medallist but his thoughts stretched back still further yesterday — to that day when everything changed in November, 2001.

The man from Ballinahown was just 20-year-old when he crashed his motorbike with such horrific repercussions on his way to a soccer match in Tullamore. It had been a long, hard road from there to here.

“When you see the flag go up, I don’t know, you just think how proud you are to be Irish,” he said after a gruelling 48km race. “To see that flag on top of the rest of them, you know, is a real special moment. It doesn’t happen that often.

“It could be a long time before it happens again – hopefully not – but I’m just trying to take it in. The last 10 years have been a struggle and it was nice to top it off, to be able to celebrate something now.”

Rohan was left paralysed from the chest down as a result of his accident but sport had always held him in its grip and it refused to let go. To this day, he hears of super-fit inter-county footballers retiring at 30 and 35 and shakes his head.

He is now the Paralympic time trial and the road race champion in the H1 class and, though he intends to spread his wings and try something new for the next 18 months, he gave every indication that he would be in Rio in 2016 defending those titles.

It was a perfectly-executed race with Rohan following the tactics agreed by the team to a tee: breaking from the main group after four-and-a-half of the six laps and guiding Switzerland’s Tobias Fankhauser and 2008 champion Wolfgang Schattauer of Austria home.

By then, news had already emerged from the Olympic Stadium that Catherine O’Neill had secured a silver medal in her third Games thanks to a season’s best throw of 5.66m in the F51/52/53 discus, although Josie Pearson of Great Britain did spoil things just a tad.

“Yeah, I lost my world record today and don’t quite know how to think about that,” said the 36-year old O’Neill, who hails from New Ross in Wexford. “I will enjoy the moment and look to chase that record back next year.”

With Jason Smyth, the temptation is to declare that, like Alexander, there are no more worlds to conquer. Not in the Paralympic arena. Last night, he defended his T13 200m title in much the same manner he had his 100m version last Saturday.

A chasm-like 0.9 seconds separated him from Alexey Labzin of Russia in second place. The man from Eglinton in Derry glided home, bettering his own Paralympic world record time with a run clocked at 21.05.

His able-bodied PB is faster, as it is in the shorter distance, and at 24 he still has time on his side in his attempt to qualify for the Olympic Games – something which escaped him by an agonising 0.04 seconds.

“The Paralympics remain part of my targets,” he said. “I get grants from the Irish Sports Council and I am funded as a Paralympic athlete and what I achieve. It will always be my number one priority to defend my titles and do what I am capable of doing.

“There is absolutely no doubt that a major goal is to try and make Rio (in 2016) as an Olympian. I was close this year. There is more to come and it would be wrong of me to not have that as a goal.”