Róisín Ní Ríain learning the value of patience as she eyes LA Olympics

The Games timing looks right for the Irish swimmer.

Róisín Ní Ríain of Ireland on her way to winning bronze in the Women’s 100m Butterfly S13, Swimming Championships at the OCBC Aquatic Centre in Singapore. Pic: Ian MacNicol/Sportsfile

Strange to say it but there are players and athletes out there who dread that first whistle or sound of the gun. Some love the life, the training, the routine, but could quite easily do without the end product.

Róisín Ní Ríain isn’t one of them.

“I mean, I absolutely love racing,” says the two-time Paralympic medallist and 2023 world champion. “I always say there's athletes that really like training, and there's athletes that really like racing.

“I'm one of the ones that absolutely loves to race. I always do. I always have. I love the adrenaline before and after a race. I just love everything that goes with competing, basically.

“I like any opportunity I have to compete, I will take any opportunity I have because the amount of opportunities I get to compete against the girls that I would compete against at the major competitions is not that often.

“When I'm competing here in Ireland I'm competing against able-bodied swimmers, which I absolutely can compete against, and always do compete against, but there's a different type of competition in my head when I'm competing against girls that would be the same as me.” 

If the life of an athlete was to be presented as a food pyramid then the actual time they spend in competition would be the burger and chips and fizzy drink sitting at the very top, training and rest providing the foundations down below.

That’s even more apparent in Paralympic sports.

Football and rugby and plenty of other sports boast schedules that have burst beyond the boundaries of a normal calendar. Players are being burnt out on the incessant demand for more and more content to fill screens and provide clickable content.

Paralympians don’t have the same problem.

The movement has always had to contend with challenges over finance, equipment, money, governance and others besides and the scarcity of high-profile events across a four-year cycle only exacerbates the issues.

That’s the big picture stuff. If there isn’t a tsunami of big meets for Ni Riain in a year that peaks with September’s European Championships then that’s no bad thing as she establishes the sort of base that will see her through to the LA Games in 2028.

This is the time to put in the extra hours and the extra metres, to build those aerobic systems so that she will be at a peak of physical and mental well-being come 2027 when the qualifiers for Los Angeles kick in.

The timing looks right for Ní Ríain who, at the tender age of just 21, is now a senior figure on a Para swimming squad that has lost the experience of people like Ellen Keane and Nicole Turner since the last Games in Paris two years ago.

Fast forward a year and she will be finished her chemistry course in UL where she is also the only Para swimmer in a squad of roughly 20 swimmers working out of the Swim Ireland high-performance centre run by John Szaranek.

Six of that squad combined to win 15 international medals in 2025. Ní Ríain and Ellie McCartney, like John Shortt, pitched in with five, her podiums coming in the 100m backstroke, 100m breaststroke, 400m freestyle, 200m individual medley and 100m butterfly.

It’s a staggering breadth of achievement in both distance and stroke and it’s another reason why the scarcity of major international meets through 2026 is something that may actually stand to her further down the line.

“I have such a big schedule at my major competitions that I have so much to train for. I have to train all four strokes every day, pretty much, to be able to race all the events I do. I also obviously compete in the individual medley, which is a race which includes all four strokes.” 

The individual medley had always been the focus but that was tweaked last year when she opted to put more effort into the fly and the results were positive come the end of the summer for her to pull more on that same string this year.

There’s an excitement in that which is propelling her through all those days of prep as we pass the mid-point in this particular four-year cycle. The possibilities and combinations are opening up before her. It’s a lack of certainty that excites her.

“So, come LA, I don't know, I can't tell you what events I'd be swimming or what my best events will be, but potentially different to Paris is what I would hope.”