Sanita Puspure: 'It hits you hard. It takes time to get over'

ONWARDS AND UPWARDS: Sanita Puspure, left, and Zoe Hyde of Ireland celebrate with their bronze medals after finishing third in the Women's Double Sculls Final A, in a time of 06:52.81, during day 8 of the World Rowing Championships 2022. Pic: Piaras Ó Mídheach/Sportsfile

A year and four months have been and gone since Sanita Puspure sat stilled and disconsolate in her boat on the Sea Forest Waterway just as Paul O’Donovan and Fintan McCarthy were making land and walking into the sea of celebrations that would come with their Olympic gold medal effort.

Most people will have forgotten Puspure’s minor role in that day’s drama. Excised its proximity to the headline acts. For Puspure it’s not that easy. Days like that stay with you. They can elbow in on your thoughts, like a narky commuter in a Monday morning bus queue, colonising your mood for hours or invading your sleep.

“It's been interesting,” says Puspure of life since Tokyo last summer. “Lots of thinking, lots of thinking again, trying to decide what to do.”

Tokyo looked like being her time, the cap on a career that had been the height of striving and success. Ireland’s only rower at the London Games in 2012, she went to Rio four years later having earned a pair of single sculls bronze medals in two of the previous three European Championships.

The Rodrigo de Freitas Lagoon in Lagoa almost broke her. She finished 0.65 seconds and one place outside the final and it prompted a declaration that she would never go near an Olympics again. It was an emotion of its time and place but the passing days and weeks brought perspective and defiance and healing.

Four gold medals, two European and two Worlds, won between 2018 and 2020 produced a new wave of confidence and expectation. That rippled through impressive runs in the preliminary race and in the quarter-final in the Japanese capital before a scarcely believable fifth-place finish and elimination from medal contention in the semis.

The next year and more was always going to be tough.

“I'm still dealing with bits of it, yeah. I was a shambles when I came home, obviously. When you give sport so much of your time and your life and you focus on it so much, and something doesn't quite work out the way you think it's going to work out, it really crushes you.

“Like, it hits you hard and obviously it takes time to get over and takes time to find reasons why it went wrong, and I'm still looking at it and figuring it out.” 

Fragments of an answer have been pieced together. Puspure can look back and see that a combination of illness and injuries in and around that Covid period left her vulnerable but there is a bullishness and, as she says herself, a naivety in athletes in pushing through obstacles.

Maybe it was the winter that was ruined by illness. Maybe the heart and soul she had poured into the previous few years in topping those podiums had left the well dry when it mattered the most. Either way, she knew even as she crossed the line in first place in that Olympic quarter-final that something wasn’t right.

“I don't know, we're still getting to the bottom of it, to be honest.” 

The details are one part of the puzzle but she knows the outline of where things went wrong. She is a member of the Olympic Federation of Ireland’s athletes commission now and plans to use her voice and her experience by educating younger versions of herself in how to focus on the journey rather than the destination.

It’s advice she can still use herself.

Puspure was already 39 when she closed the door on the last elongated, five-year Olympic cycle. That’s not necessarily old in a sport where athletes can keep going at the highest level into their 40s and the siren song of the water eventually lured her back after the post-Olympic lull and a six-month stint with injury.

The familiar rhythm of training eased a broken heart, a new part-time role coaching in UCC strengthened the sport’s grip again, and the relationship broke new ground when she teamed up with Zoe Hyde in the double sculls and the pair came home from the Worlds in the Czech Republic in September with a bronze from the blue.

The partnership clearly works on different levels. If she is miserable in a training session now then she has at least someone with which to share the load although it was a bout of sickness for the elder partner that put paid to their hopes of another medal at the European Championships in Munich in August.

Paris and the next Olympics lie a not insignificant 18 months and more down the track. The women’s double sculls is part of that tweaked programme and, though the number of boats to qualify may be reduced from eleven to nine, Puspure isn’t knocking back the possibility that she may make it to a fourth Games.

“Look, I'm at the stage where I'm still physically doing good. Mentally I'm doing better now than I did last year so I'm taking it one step at a time. I'm enjoying my new journey now in the double, so it's very fresh and very new, a different challenge and, yeah, time will tell.”