Ellen Walshe on overcoming challenges to mind and body ahead of Paris
PARIS BOUND: Ellen Walshe during a Team Ireland Paris 2024 Aquatics team training session at the National Aquatic Centre on the Sport Ireland Campus in Dublin. Photo by Seb Daly/Sportsfile
Ellen Walshe qualified for the Tokyo Olympics with just three weeks to spare in 2021.
She was only 19 at the time and the achievement caught everyone by surprise, not least the Templeogue swimmer herself.
There’s a pride now in being an Olympian but the experience at a Games delayed a year by the pandemic and stripped of supporters for its duration back in 2021 didn’t match the dream with Walshe’s time failing to match the figures that had booked her passage.
“In the end I had to get photos for the media [done] and I was on a plane going halfway across the world with no family, no nothing. It was a whirlwind of emotions and I don't think I was the happiest swimmer over there.”
Booking Paris has been different.
Her Irish record time of 2:10.92 in the women’s 200m Individual Medley at last summer’s World Aquatic Championships in Japan sealed her spot in Paris with over a year to spare and she has four potential swims this time, including the 400m Medley Relay.
If all that suggests a smooth passage then it has been anything but.
Walshe has surpassed two of Michelle Smith’s Irish records from the books in recent years but the Dubliner has been challenged in mind and in body, her story encapsulating the myriad ways in which an athlete has to face and overcome adversity.
The body first.
Glandular fever is no joke. For an elite swimmer it was the worst sort of purgatory given there is no antidote other than rest. It took Walshe eight months to flush it fully from her system at a time when she was still a scholarship student at the University of Tennessee.
“It was really, really tricky. Diagnosing it was one thing. I was over in the States, competing in SECs [South Eastern Conference] and NCAAs. I was a very valuable athlete to that team.
"That was the hardest bit to step back from, but I was not okay myself. It took a while to figure it out and I just put myself on a plane and went home. We dealt with it on this side.
“The team have been great in Sport Ireland. My own GPs and doctors have been great in helping me get back to where I wanted to be. It took many months and a lot of frustration.
"A comeback is one of the toughest things, because you're not hitting the target time that you've hit before. You don't know if you can ever make it back to the position you were in.”
Now the mind.
Tokyo was a disappointment. She would have made the semi-finals had she matched the time that got her there in the heats, but the crushing disappointment was framed by a painful understanding that her nerves had been a major drag in the water.
She had no idea how to handle them. It had been an issue all through her junior years, even as she moved up the chain and through various Irish squads and systems. There were no crumbs to follow, she just figured things out for herself.
“As a junior athlete, a young 15, 16 year-old, you are undefeatable: everything you say is right. I was definitely a bit of a diva when I was younger and no-one was going to get in the way of that. I didn't know how to deal with it as a junior athlete and I don't think it's talked about enough in the junior ranks.
“In senior it is well talked about, there are resources there, but as a junior coming up you don't have the support around you. I kind of figured it out on my own, to be honest. It did take many years. I probably wasted, well I can't say wasted, but it did hurt my junior years a lot by not being able to deal with nerves.
“I go out and I get to the block and I'll be all pumped and ready… and that's it. My head would be like 'no'. I would just finish the race. It took a while to get over that. The first time that I probably noticed that I learned to control it was qualifying for the Olympic Games. I had put that aside, you can achieve whatever now.”
The Tokyo Aquatics Centre was a spacious 15,000-seater arena bereft of fans and atmosphere. Walshe had never been in a stadium so big. The Paris La Defense Arena can fit over 30,000 in for rugby matches and tickers have gone like hot cakes.
When Walshe and her colleagues on the Irish swim team compete at big international meets it is invariably at faraway destinations like Singapore or Japan. This one is basically next door and they will be competing in front of friends and family like never before.
She likes the idea of that.
“To embrace the moment with Irish flags is going to be a very special moment.”
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