Sport a family affair but Elizabeth Carr taking her own road to Paris

The triathlete, a daughter of former Dublin boss Tommy, is currently on a career break from the military. 

ROAD TO PARIS: Elizabeth Carr. Pic: Triathlon Ireland. 

Nature or nurture? Why one or the other? Elizabeth Carr has had the benefit of both. Her father is Tommy Carr, former Dublin football captain and manager. Sean Purcell, the legendary Galway midfielder, was her maternal granddad. And Carr herself isn’t alone in extending this sporting tradition to the next branch of the family tree.

Currently on a career break from the Army as she attempts to qualify for the Paris Olympics as a triathlete, her brother Simon retired as a professional tennis player this week, her sister Vicky plays football for Westmeath while another brother, Gareth, is a scratch golfer who played a bit of senior inter-county ball too.

How? Why them? Why … all of them?

“Oh God, while we have a GAA background I think our parents really wanted us to not be focused on just one sport, even outside of sport, [not] just one thing in general,” says Carr ahead of a crucial few weeks for her sporting ambitions.

“They were very varied in their approach to life and they thought it was important that we developed as people as a whole rather than just sportspeople or academically or whatever. They wanted us to be balanced as individuals.” 

If all this conjures images of four kids going at each other hammer and tongs with balls and bats in the back garden then the reality doesn’t match up. Elizabeth and Vicky are separated by seven years, Simon and Gareth are closer in age but their rivalry seems to extend no further than the odd game of golf.

That they all disappeared down their own rabbit holes acted as another natural break on any burgeoning rivalries and even the family heritage seems minimal in terms of influence. Tommy stopped playing two years before Elizabeth was born. Her memories of his time managing the county are restricted to a house visit or two by some of the boys in blue.

So, if there was any primary cause for their impressive sporting CVs then it might be the fact that Tommy and Mary Carr encouraged them to throw plenty of darts at the board and see what might stick. For Elizabeth, that first bullseye was middle-distance and cross-country running.

She started running with Mullingar Harriers and taking her baby steps at the Community Games as a sprinter and hurdler before moving up in distance. That eventually led to eleven national titles as a junior before injuries and a plateau in progress in her late-teens forced a change of direction.

She looks back now and thinks maybe the intensity required to make it as a senior athlete caught her short. Or maybe it was just growing pains. Dreams of a US scholarship came and went but Carr landed on her feet at DCU. Her athletics never kicked back into gear but it was where she discovered a love and aptitude for triathlon.

Another thing she found on Dublin’s northside was balance. She lived her life, went off on a few J1s to the States, did her training and studied her sports science, but the competitive bug had left its mark. Now here she is putting her life on hold, having given in to its bite.

And it’s a drive that takes you to all sorts of places and lengths.

Simon knows what it is to traverse the globe but even he was shocked at his sister hopping from Zimbabwe to Cuba in successive weekends in her bid to make Paris. The rest of May will be spent chasing qualifying points in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan before the ranking positions become final.

That she is even here now, still in the running, is an achievement in itself given an Achilles injury, eventually confirmed as plantaris tendon, that went undiagnosed for more or less a year and which cost her an enormous chunk of the qualifying window.

The process of actually qualifying makes for a complicated web, as is the case with so many of the Olympic sports, but she is effectively hoping to make it through a back-door pathway that depends on results elsewhere as much as her own.

If that all sounds like a trial then it must pale into comparison with her experiences as a platoon commander with the 118 Infantry Battalion when they served as peacekeepers with UNIFIL in Lebanon three years ago.

Much of her dad’s time as a player and a coach with Dublin overlapped with his own career in the Defence Forces and Elizabeth has no doubt but that Army life has played its part in preparing her for the road ahead.

“In the army you learn to expect the unexpected and, while you might have a plan of attack, excuse the pun, that rarely if ever works out the way you want it to.

“No course is the same, the equipment you need never plays ball all of the time, and the army has taught me to adapt to different situations. If problems arise you just have to power through and find a way to get the job done.”