Gary O'Donovan: Dominic Casey deserves world coaching honour
Gary O’Donovan is hoping it will be third time lucky for legendary Skibbereen coach Dominic Casey in this year’s prestigious World Rowing awards.
The man who helped himself and brother Paul win Olympic silver in Rio 2016, and to such an emphatic World Lightweight Double Sculls title last month has just been short-listed for the international ‘Coach of the Year’ award for the third consecutive season.
“It would be really great to see Dominic win it,” O’Donovan said.
“He’d probably hate it himself because he has this thing where he hates attention and likes to stay quiet in the background. I don’t think anyone outside of ourselves knows just how much he does for us so we’re delighted for him.”
The O’Donovans and Sanita Puspure, who was equally dominant in winning her World Single Sculls title in Bulgaria, have also been nominated, which further underlines Irish rowing’s global status in the sport right now.
Germany are the only countries with three nominees on the list, that’s pretty phenomenal.”
Puspure is up against Canada’s top women’s pair and Poland’s quadruple sculls. The O’Donovan’s competition for men’s ‘Crew of the Year’ is the Australian four, Germany’s men’s eight and the latter’s lightweight single sculler Jason Osborne.
Casey’s ‘Coach of the Year’ category includes Uwe Bender (Germany), Jan Klerks (Netherlands), and Laurel Korholz (USA). The winners will be announced at a World Rowing event in Berlin on November 23.
O’Donovan was due to compete individually in Boston last weekend but pulled out due to illness. The Cork IT Marketing graduate is currently based in Dublin, getting some work experience while training in Islandbridge and in the Institute of Sport.
Skibb’s Olympic heroes went to New Zealand for the first time last winter to do a block of intensive training, but that looks unlikely to be repeated in 2019 given Paul, already a qualified physiotherapist, has just returned to UCC to study medicine.
However, they will be getting in some warm-weather training in the near future.
“We’re headed to Seville for three weeks once Paul has finished his exams. That’s a class training centre that we regularly use and we’ll spend time there before and after Christmas,” he confirmed.
