Annalise Murphy: 'I just stopped turning up to competitions'

Murphy dropped anchor on her career as an Olympic sailor after her third Games, in Tokyo last year.

Sat, 24 Dec, 2022 - 07:14

Brendan O'Brien

It’s supposed to be old soldiers, not athletes, that fade away. Let’s face it, sporting careers don’t normally end in nuance. To cross that Rubicon from elite competitor to retirement is to brave icy and bracing waters. It’s not just the sport that falls away but all the scaffolding that supported it.

So many retirements are brutal in their timing or their manner. For every Brian O’Driscoll, waved off with an enormous banner bearing his likeness at the Aviva Stadium and with a Six Nations medal in his pocket, there are thousands for whom the last waltz slips out of tune.

Annalise Murphy dropped anchor on her career as an Olympic sailor after her third Games, in Tokyo last year, but there was no big announcement, just a reference after her last race in Japan that she probably wouldn’t be aiming for Paris 2024 and that she was looking forward to a normal life.

“I just stopped turning up to competitions!” she says now. “Like, I'm still going to sail for the rest of my life and I'd still love to sail professionally. I'm not doing Olympic sailing anymore but it doesn't mean I'm not going sailing.

“I know some people when they retire from their Olympic sport, that's kind of it, but there are huge opportunities on the professional side of it and then just also for the fun of sailing with my friends and family. It's part of my life.”

Elite sport tends to take up most of the jug and that invariably leaves vessels in dire need of a refill when it’s time to move on. Murphy, for example, has spoken before about how she associated a certain size and weight with success on the water and how this has left her with insecurities about her body.

There can be so much to untangle.

Some find that a new path, one untainted by their earlier footsteps, is the way to go. Others lean on what they know so well to guide them through the unknown to come. Murphy has opted for the latter of those two roads, not just through sailing itself but via an adjunct to that previous existence.

Cycling is a core ingredient in training for lots of sailors and it allows her to maintain her links with old comrades while holding the door open for a competitive spirit which helped her claim a silver medal in Rio in 2016 and took her to the brink of the Olympic podium in London four years before.

HERO: Annalise Murphy at her homecoming ceremony in Dun Laoghaire, after her silver medal win at the Rio Olympics in 2016. Pic: Inpho

The racing bug has been continued with the national series league on the road and in the national time trials where she finished fourth at just her third attempt. Not bad for a rookie who claims to be barely treading water.

“I was actually in the garage of Bryan Keane, the Rio Olympian in triathlon, the night before with the hacksaw hacking bits of the bike off because it wasn't UCI legal, I was there looking at the rulebook and had the tape measures out but I had no idea what I was doing!”

It’s not all about what she can still get from sport. Putting back is vital too.

Murphy knows how lucky she was on her own journey. Her mother Cathy McAleavey was an Olympian in 1988 and her father Con was a coach and a sailing official at the Games. Add in her own coach, Rory Fitzpatrick, who competed in Athens in 2004, and she had a deep reservoir of knowledge and care behind her.

The plan now is to bring her own experiences and lessons to bear for the younger generation of hopefuls via the mentor programme being established by the Olympic Federation of Ireland’s athletes’ commission. Among the others broadcasting on the same network are the likes of Paddy Barnes, Sanita Puspure and Natalya Coyle.

“My idea of the mentor programme is so that we can give back because I just think that one conversation with someone can make a huge difference. When I was a teenager, one of the most well-respected Irish sailors, Maurice O'Connell, said 'you're going to be in London 2012'.

“It hadn't even occurred to me at that point that I could be at the London Olympics. That seemed so far away from me but it put that little seed in my head. The importance of someone saying, 'You can do it, this is possible', can make a huge difference, particularly in young athletes in the pathway they're moving through.”

There was no Hollywood ending to her script. She had aspirations of a gold medal as Tokyo approached on the back of that 12-month delay in the summer of 2021 but finishes of 30th and 40th in successive races consigned her to 14th and a watching brief for the medal finales at the Enoshima Yacht Harbour, an hour south of the capital.

Disappointing as that was, how could it overshadow a career that earned her Ireland’s first Olympic sailing medal, three appearances at the Games, the Irish Times’ nod as Sportswoman of the Year, a nomination for RTÉ’s Sportsperson of the Year and a seat as Grand Marshall of Dublin’s St Patrick’s Day parade?

“Unfortunately, you can’t be an athlete for your entire life and I wanted to figure out something else that gives me satisfaction. There is probably nothing that will give the same satisfaction and enjoyment as Olympic sailing because the thrill is like nothing else.

I guess I have a huge amount of happiness that I got to do what I loved every day. It’s only when you look back on it that I see I got to live the dream. It was hard but I was passionate about it. It never felt really hard, I always knew the reasons why I was doing it.

“You always remember the ones that you miss out on more than the ones you did well in, but I am so glad that I got the opportunity to be a sportsperson because it was the most fantastic career. I had the best time in my 20s in terms of pushing myself and seeing what was possible and I will never regret that.”