Mona McSharry: ‘I’d love to beat eighth at my next Olympics’
This is how it’s been. Fifteen Irish swimmers had dipped their toes in the Olympic pool since 1996 and all had found the waters treacherous. Out of the 32 races contested up to Tokyo, none had been in a final. Truth be told, only one had come within an outstretched arm, let alone a fingertip, of doing it.
Andrew Bree couldn’t have done much more at the iconic ‘Water Cube’ aquatic centre in Beijing back in 2008. The County Down man destroyed the Irish record in the 200m breaststroke heats, tearing over two seconds off the previous mark.
Another chunk came off that in the semi-finals, the then 27-year old posting a time of 2:10.16 and another national best. It was an astonishing effort at the absolute ideal time in his career but one that still fell 0.19 seconds short of France’s Hugues Duboscq in the last qualifying slot.
Duboscq would actually go on to claim the bronze in the final and the winner of that semi-final he shared with Bree? Japan’s Kosuke Kitajima, who recorded a new Olympic record, and then another, in claiming the gold. This is how competitive Olympic swimming is. The depth is ridiculous.
The only other Irish swimmer to even make a semi-final since ’96 was Shane Ryan in the 100m backstroke in Rio. He finished over a second adrift of the nearest qualifier and with the slowest of the times posted by all 16 swimmers who had made it that far. The quantum leap that is the Olympics just can’t be overstated.
Ryan won a bronze medal in the 50m backstroke at the 2018 World Short Course Championships. He has two European bronze medals too. Bree was a silver medallist at the 2003 European Short Course Championship in Dublin. And these are guys for whom an Olympic final has been beyond the Pale.
This is how it always is.
Michelle Smith’s three golds and one bronze in Atlanta in 1996 are rarely mentioned now when it comes to Irish Olympic performances in the pool but they nevertheless stand as incongruous peaks in the context of the sport in this country. Not just in being the only medals but in the very fact that she got to stand on the starting blocks.
This is the background to Mona McSharry’s achievement here this week in making the final of the 100m breaststroke.
There was no one else’s baggage holding her back here.
“Once you get here and get into your routine, you kind of forget it’s the Olympics because the routine is the same, whether you’re at Europeans or a dual meet or trials,” she explained after posting her eighth place finish in the final of the 100m breaststroke on Tuesday morning.
“Any competition you’re always doing the same thing. So I just take it as another semi-final and a final. I’m hearing all the messages from people and the fact that only one other Irish person made the final kind of means it’s a bigger final, it’s a little bit bigger than the normal ones.”
McSharry three times posted times under one minute seven seconds when doing so once this week would have made for a standout effort. That the slowest of the three came in the final — 0.7 below her best — sours the taste of this success but not enough to take from a wave of positive vibes and satisfaction.
She walked out onto the pool deck Tuesday morning with a beaming smile and in the mood to soak up every last second of this experience, her bounce pre-race reflective of a solid night’s sleep that came with the knowledge that she had already exceeded the most outlandish of expectations in her first Games.
“I was more nervous about semis to finals than the final. I kind of think I was really stressed because I knew I was on the cusp of making a final. I knew I wanted to but it would have been tight. Once I’d done that, I felt it was a relief. I could go out and race and enjoy it.”
It’s a long way from the Pier Head Hotel in Mullaghmore where she took her first swimming lessons at the age of five but this shouldn’t be, and hopefully won’t be, the pinnacle in a career that still has miles of road to cover. Just off her freshman year at the University of Tennessee, she has already hailed the role the US college system has played for her.
The move Stateside allowed her to continue swimming competitively through the worst of Covid. There are 10 students from the university in action here in Tokyo and that’s a level of internal talent and drive that suits a woman who showed such a single-minded dedication to her craft all the way up from her days travelling to and from Ballyshannon for training.
McSharry is the first to acknowledge that there can be no standing still, noting that it was a 17-year-old Lydia Jacoby who won gold in her race, the Alaskan seeing off South Africa’s Tatjana Schoenmaker and the USA’s defending Olympic champion and world-record holder Lilly King to take the title.
Standards are rising all the time and, for McSharry. As of now, expectation with it. Paris may just be three years away yet but she came into this 2020 Games with the mindset that just making that gathering in the French capital would again stand as a decent achievement.
That’ll have to be rethought now, she laughed.
“I think my goal for the next three years is just to try to perfect my race strategy,” she explained. “I’m still trying to figure out what works for me. I’m still quite young so I think just training and seeing…
“Yeah I’d love to beat eighth at my next Olympics I guess, try and beat my own little targets and just see what happens. It’s all about getting your hands on the wall first. It’s just a race and that’s why we do it. That’s why we love the sport.”
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