Gary O’Reilly: 'The pedals were hitting my stomach and my shoulders were hitting the wheels'
Gary O’Reilly: 'The pedals were hitting my stomach and my shoulders were hitting the wheels'
When Gary O’Reilly first got his racing hand bike, he was afraid to start using it.
“I got it into the house and just looked at it for a week but the minute I got into it I just couldn’t get out of it.”
On his very first spin he did 40km, from his hometown of Portlaoise almost as far as Ballybrittas and back.
“I just didn’t want to stop. After the accident you start to feel all the things you can’t do,” he reflects.
“All of a sudden you realise you can do something.”
By the time he was 16, he already had his own car for drift-racing and was never happier than when tinkering with cars or motorbikes.
From school he went straight into a garage as an apprentice panel-beater.
One day in March 2014, when there was a problem with the car-wash, he went up on a forklift to help load water into it. When it was emptied the weight displacement threw him off and he fell from 15 feet.
Within 48 hours he was being told he might never walk again.
His three shattered vertebrae were pressing on his spinal cord so spinal decompression surgery was urgently performed and rods inserted in his back. Then came three gruelling months in the National Rehabilitation Hospital (NRH) in Dun Laoghaire.
He was just 20 at the time and only dating Hazel (Westman), a student nurse from Rosenallis, for around eight months.
He recalls that, even amid the excruciating pain and disorientation in A&E, he told her “you don’t need to stay with me if this is it.”
When you see him competing in Tokyo you’ll see an elite athlete powering along in a hand bike but few can conceive of his battle since and he makes very light of it.
He actually thought he was coping OK until he went for his second annual check-up.
His spinal specialist quietly enquired if he might benefit from talking to a psychologist and suddenly he found himself in floods of tears.
While he was in the NRC he’d politely refused counselling, genuinely figuring he didn’t need it.
He’d returned to Portlaoise in a wheelchair but also had a leg brace and crutches and had regained some feeling in his upper legs.
He quickly got into wheelchair sport, especially basketball, but as time went on, ennui set in.
The heavier he got, the harder it was to use his crutches so he was spending more time in the wheelchair, caught in a difficult Catch 22 of inactivity and frustration.
“I’d gone up to 20 stone, pure comfort eating. The doctor asked me if I’d like to talk to someone and suddenly I just broke down in her office. It was very weird.”
Weird maybe but also an epiphany.
“I went to see the psychologist and it just gave me something to focus on. Two weeks later, when I went back to see her, I’d already lost a stone.”
Taking back control over his body proved a turning point. He started training in a gym and, as he grew in fitness and confidence, a chance meeting with Declan Slevin gave him added impetus.
The Westmeath man is one of Ireland’s top-hand cyclists and competed in the Rio Paralympics.
“I’d got a (hand) bike but it was all wrong for me. It was very heavy, the pedals were hitting my stomach and my shoulders were hitting the wheels.
“I met Declan in the lift at a wheelchair basketball match one day, told him I was thinking about buying a new bike and asked for his advice. He said there was a spare ‘kneeler’ in Naas that I could try. Dec has really been a great help to me.”
What O’Reilly initially thought would be a good form of exercise turned into far more.
The minute he got into a hand bike, he felt at home and has made remarkably quick progress.
By 2017 he was competing in the national hand cycling league and his first competition for Ireland was in Rosenau, France in 2018. He only went over to meet a guy who could design a customised racing bike for him but finished third in the competition.
Maybe it’s the petrol-head in him but apart from the speed and the freedom of it, he loves the techy stuff — the power-metre, the wattage, the heart-rate monitor. “I just concentrated all my energies on it and never had a problem with anything.” Finishing sixth at a UCI World Cup time trial in France in 2019 brought the realisation that he could be seriously competitive and he has, literally, pushed on since; a full-time athlete who trains over 20 hours a-week on local roads and foreign training camps and is supported by a €20,000 grant from Sport Ireland and sponsorship from Midland Steel.
His big breakthrough came in this year’s World Road Championships in Portugal in June — winning bronze in the time trial and finishing fourth in the road race.
That’s propelled him to Tokyo, ranked fifth in the H5 competition, probably one Paralympic cycle earlier than he expected.
The benefits to his overall health are also clear.
He’s now lithe and fit and has almost full feeling in his legs until just below his knees. He walks with the aid of crutches and ankle splints and only uses a wheelchair for long distances.
And Hazel? She’s now qualified and nursing in Portlaoise Hospital and did a block of her training in the Mater spinal unit where he had his surgery. They got engaged this year and will marry by a lake in Wicklow in 2022.
He will be one of two Laois Paralympians in Tokyo which includes experienced Portarlington swimmer Nicole Turner.
His family and friends gave him a huge socially distanced send-off outside the family gate: a noisy, joyful five-minute drive-by of every imaginable vehicle blasting horns and waving flags.
“My life has been changed so positively by this, it’s crazy,” O’Reilly says. “At the World Championships just gone, winning a medal? I just couldn’t believe that and now I’m going to the Paralympics. I am nervous and only hope I do myself justice.” Once a speedster, always a speedster.
What’s the fastest he’s ever gone in the hand bike?
“I’ve got it up to 85kph coming down the Wolftrap (mountain) up in the Slieve Blooms,” he grins.
“You can definitely get a buzz out of it.”
CONNECT WITH US TODAY
Be the first to know the latest news and updates
