The woman who must do it all — and do it well

For Pierre de Coubertin, it embodied all the skills needed to be more than just a top athlete, but a perfect cavalry soldier.

He’d studied how the ancient Olympics were created around the strengths of a Greek warrior and this was his way of updating those strengths and building a deeper sense of continuity. So it was that in 1912, his modern pentathlon first took place in his modern Olympics and was a simulation of being behind enemy lines where you had to ride a horse you’d never sat on, fight with a pistol and with a sword and be able to excel when it came to both running and swimming.

Exactly a century on and those skills have brought Natalya Coyle to our attention. She’s Ireland’s first qualifier in the sport since Moscow and she’s Ireland’s very last competitor this time around at what has been our most successful Games since Melbourne. It’s quite a step up for the girl who was found to have potential at the Pony Club and whose journey to this point truly started “when I had a sword put in my hand and I started going up and down a room stabbing people — that wasn’t the best way to start an Olympic campaign but that’s when it did begin”.

Tomorrow morning she will start off her day by fencing everyone in a one-touch competition in bouts that last a minute. Next up will be a 200m swimming time trial. Then comes the show jumping and once that’s out of the way, points are accumulated to produce a start list which is staggered. From there it’s a biathlon-style race made up of running and shooting to the finish.

It may sound bizarre, but it’s not all that different to tetrathlons, run by the Irish Pony Club, which Coyle grew up doing near her home in Tara.

“They are similar but don’t have the fencing element. But I remember thinking I was running out of Pony Club years, you can only do that till 21 and you’d be looking a little odd after that. So I wanted to move on and that’s where fencing came in. It was something I’d always have struggled with until more recently and the whole thing was sporadic initially. But Lindsey [Weedon, Ireland’s high performance director] came along, took my life and put me on a different course. In 2010 I started doing World Cups and qualified for the World Cup final that year. And that’s happened the last three years and now here I am.”

She’s the prize for a sporting organisation that had to overcome the law before they could get anywhere. A decade ago, when some people got together and tried to create a niche market for their passion, air rifles were illegal in Ireland. Yet now there’s a three-strong team of modern pentathletes and two at the Olympics. And even if, at 21, Coyle may be a little too young to feature this time, it’s the experience that will count come Rio. After all, the average age for female medallists in the sport over the last two Olympics has been 26.

“It’s important to get a sense of it all and I can’t wait for that,” continues Coyle, who had her Trinity College exams deferred until October to accommodate her sporting achievements. “But it’s not just experience, I am hugely competitive and I love seeing the progress I make from putting in huge work in training. I train about 25 hours a week. About eight hours of swimming broken up into two four-hour sessions. Three one-to-two-hour fencing sessions, just sparring. Three half-an-hour individual fencing sessions for technique. I shoot about four times a week as I grew up with a rifle, not an air pistol. And I run five times a week. I do two gyms and one horse riding too. So I want to prove to myself it’s all worth it and push myself further each time to show progress.”

But the progress is there for all to see when you read the back story.

Just five years ago when Coyle was approached about the idea of competing she wasn’t even sure what the sport entailed. Yet here she is, so soon after, one of the elite in the sport the Olympic founder himself devised as the ultimate test of human quality.