Darragh Greene is making a splash

By Brendan O'Brien

Avoid rush hour and the drive from UCD on Dublin’s southside up the M50 and across the River Liffey to the National Sports Campus (NSC) in Abbotstown can be done in the time it takes to watch an episode of Fair City.

Not exactly a trek, in other words. For Darragh Greene, though, it amounted to a life-changing journey. A voyage of discovery, it was a hop across the capital that has had enormous ramifications for his sporting ambitions and his education. And his body.

A sprinter in UCD’s elite swimming programme — when he wasn’t studying for a degree in Sports Management — he parked the studies and switched to the endurance end of the sport on his arrival on the northside.

John Rudd, Swim Ireland’s high-performance director, spotted the Longford native’s high endurance capacity and that triggered the increase in race distances, training loads and, inevitably, volumes of food required to sustain all that.

The alteration required in body and mind can’t be overstated. He has moved lock, stock and barrel to the NSC where he shares a house with four others. Training is six days a week and with the usual dawn chorus starts that are as synonymous with swimming as Speedos.

His degree has been parked to accommodate all this.

Food has become fuel, a chore rather than a pleasure. The extra dietary needs are no surprise given he covers as much distance in a week’s training now as he once did in a month in UCD.

“It was a very, very big change, even though it was just across town,” Greene explained to the Irish Examiner ahead of the European Championships which begin for him today with the 50m breaststroke heats in Glasgow.

Just the environment itself and the training I’m doing now, UCD was a sprint programme but I have completely changed my training. It is fairly specific to what I need myself to be able to swim season’s best. That means doing a lot more mileage now.

The results have been spectacular. Greene was the standout performer at April’s national championships at the National Aquatic Centre in claiming the 50m, 100m and 200m breaststroke titles. He set a national record in the 100m and beat Rio Olympian Nicholas Quinn in the 200m with a PB.

He is 23 now, far from a rookie given the sport’s age profile, but Greene has emerged as something of a poster boy for the new way of doing things under Rudd who succeeded Peter Banks at the helm of Swim Ireland’s high-performance system.

The former England and Team GB senior coach has done away with the multiple-choice method of qualifying for major meets like the upcoming Euros. Swimmers are now told that they have to do the business at just the one pinpointed race or they get left behind.

The nationals and the Commonwealth Games in Australia, which ran concurrently this year, were the two events circled in the calendar on this occasion and Greene, unsurprisingly, is a fan of the new use-it-or-lose-it approach.

It’s fairly cut-throat. If you are not on form on the day you mightn’t have a busy summer. It’s good because in two summers’ time (at the Olympics) you want to be on form on the day, get a season’s best and get through the rounds. That is what I am hoping to do.

“Competing against Europe’s best is the start of that. Getting a season’s best will hopefully give me the opportunity to get through the rounds, but, at the same time, you can’t control how Europe is going to swim. It’s all about controlling what you can control.”

Rudd has echoed that ethos. Medals will be hard to come by in Glasgow for Irish swimmers but the manner in which the jigsaw pieces have been put in place for, and by, Greene is encouraging as Ireland looks towards Tokyo 2020 and beyond. Greene is less than a year into his new programme but he has been redirected onto a path more suited to his physiology, housed a 10-minute walk from training, a gym and the Sport Ireland Institute and risen to the challenges presented to him. This is a man who had little or no swimming background. Someone who dabbled in Gaelic football, soccer, and basketball at St Mel’s in Longford before knuckling down to the swimming in a deeper way only in fourth year at school.

The likelihood is that younger swimmers will be following in his wake.