Mona McSharry wins bronze for Ireland at the Olympic Games

It is Ireland's first medal of the 2024 Olympics.

PODIUM: Women's 100m breaststroke final bronze medallist Mona McSharry. Photo by Stephen McCarthy/Sportsfile

Okay, hands up who had Mona McSharry winning Ireland’s first medal at these Olympic Games? Don’t even think about it. It’s not that the 23-year old from Sligo wasn’t mapped, just that there were far more prominent contours on the page to catch the eye.

Daniel Wiffen was, and still is, a huge hope for silverware in the pool here on the western fringes of Paris on Tuesday night, and the men’s rugby sevens will harbour regrets at their mistakes at the Stade de France last weekend, but McSharry has touched the wall first.

Or third, in this instance. Bronze it was for Ireland.

“Unbelievable,” she explained. “I started crying on the podium and I haven't really fully stopped yet. It’s just the pinnacle of your sport to have all your hard work pay off in something like this at this moment.” She had only the fifth fastest PB of the eight finalists on show here on Monday evening, but this was an exceptional swim in the final of the women’s 100m breaststroke to take her home behind South Africa’s Tatjana Smith and Qianting of China.

Of course, to concentrate on who finished before her is to miss the point.

McSharry’s time of 1:05.59 got her over the line just one-hundredth of a second before Italy’s Benedetta Pilato and the USA’s Lilly King. You hear loose talk about the tip of a fingernail separating places in the water all the time. Here was living proof of it.

She had no idea how close a thing it had been.

“I could see the Chinese girl beside me and so I knew she was ahead of me. So I was like ‘right, I need to try and catch her because if she’s ahead then I don’t know what’s going on on the other side, I can’t see that.

“I had a bad first 50, my goggles filled up with water a little bit, so not a perfect race but I think it just shows that you’re in it until the end, you just have to keep going, and I was like ‘I’m not giving up, I’m going, I’m going’.” It is Ireland’s first Olympic medal in swimming since, well, you know who in 1996 and it is no freak wave hitting the shore for either the woman from Grange in Sligo who took up a scholarship in the University of Tennessee or for Irish swimming.

MEDALLIST: Ireland’s Mona McSharry celebrates winning a bronze medal in the 100m breaststroke at the Olympic Games. Picture: ©INPHO/James Crombie

Finals and medals have been stacking up like never before in recent years. And it was McSharry who broke a 25-year drought of Olympic finals in 2021 by finishing eighth in this same event in Tokyo three years ago.

Her own CV boasts a bronze at the 2021 World Short Course Championships, a bronze at the European equivalent in 2019, World and Junior medals galore, and three golds at continental U23 level. This was always the next step. Making it was another thing.

She had hit the bar three times in as many finals at the Worlds in Doha earlier this year. There are never any guarantees but she stood there last night not just as an Olympic medallist but as a trailblazer with it.

Again.

“Now that I have it, I'm like, ‘what's next?’ But no, it's unbelievable to be a part of, not only an athlete on an Irish team that makes a final, that makes multiple finals, but then an Irish athlete that can also win a medal is just amazing.” What’s really remarkable about McSharry is the journey she has made in her own head. She kept going full pelt at college level after Tokyo. Burnout was the almost inevitable price. By the time she went to the Europeans in Rome in 2022 she actually hated her sport.

She talked of tears in call rooms during that college season and decided to quit once the season was done. Then she started talking, to family and coaches, and she fell her back in love with swimming.

And look at her now.

“Those moments where I thought I was done really put into perspective what I really do this for,” she said. “This is a huge bonus, but there's so many other things like that come a part of this like training and watching my friends compete.

“And, you know, being able to see myself progress and get better. And then you do have bonus moments like this, where you get to stand up on the podium and watch your flag race at the Olympic Games.” All the hard years of work flashed through her mind standing on that podium. This was a date she had circled in her diary when she sat down with her coach Grace Mead back in 2015. Tokyo in 2020 (2021, as it turned out) was to be the “feeler Olympic”.

2024 would be the Games where they would “get stuff done”.

And she’s not done yet. There’s a 200m breaststroke to be swam yet but not just yet. First priority was to catch her breath. Take this all in, she told herself. Then it was some good grub, maybe a chocolate muffin and bed.

The journey continues.