Medals not top priority as Irish rowers take to World Championship waters in Amsterdam
FLYING THE FLAG AGAIN: Mags Cremen and Fintan McCarthy of team Ireland celebrate after winning Gold in the Mixed Double Scull final during the 2025 World Rowing Championships. Pic: Benedict Tufnell/Sportsfile.
Athletics and swimming have had their time in the sun this month. Now it’s rowing’s turn to take up the baton even if talk of medals and podiums is being played down as Ireland’s nine crews line up for the World Championships in Amsterdam.
This latest green contingent will be made up of four men’s boats and five women’s with a number of new combinations being tried and tested at a competition that will not count as a qualifying barometer for the LA Games in 2028.
The exploits of people like Mark English, Ellen Walsh, Rhasidat Adeleke, Andrew Coscoran and Mona McSharry in Birmingham and Paris earlier in August drew huge attention at a time when GAA, soccer and rugby fare was thin on the ground.
Rowing has delivered regularly in the last decade, but Rowing Ireland performance director Niall O’Carroll has made clear before the first Irish go in to action on Monday afternoon that results are not the be all and end all as we turn into the second-half of this Olympic cycle.
“We believe we are sending a strong Irish team to Amsterdam, but medals are not the focus we are placing on this group. Our only ask is that every crew delivers the best racing it is capable of producing.
“Several of these boats are new combinations, brought together deliberately to give athletes the opportunity to prove themselves at the highest level. They are not finished articles, and Amsterdam will give us an honest measure of where they stand against the best crews in the world.
“That information will be enormously valuable. Olympic qualification at the 2027 World Championships in Lucerne is now coming clearly into view, and this week will help us understand what is working, where the gaps remain and where our strongest opportunities may lie.”
The Irish team goes into these championships against the backdrop of controversy earlier this year after issues concerning athlete welfare under O’Connor’s predecessor Antonio Maurogiovanni and a Oireachtas hearing that generated further criticisms of Rowing Ireland.
Fiona Murtagh goes in to the meet as the team’s headline act.
The Galway woman was part of the four that won a bronze medal at the delayed Tokyo Games. She raced in sweep again in Paris three years later but has moved into the single sculls for this cycle and with huge success.
She won the 2025 World title in Lucerne, beating GRB’s Lauren Henry by 0.003 of a second and she has since backed that up by winning World Cup medals in Seville and Lucerne this term. She is in excellent form and she will need it.
Henry goes into this as European champion after a win in Varese – where Ireland did not send a team - a few weeks ago while the reigning Olympic champion, Karolien Florijn of the Netherlands, will also compete in a stacked field.
It may well be the best race of the week.
Fintan McCarthy is the team’s other single sculler but he is at a very different point in his journey having converted from the lightweight programme after he won another Olympic gold medal alongside Paul O’Donovan in Paris.
The lightweight programme has since been removed from the Games programme and the Skibbereen man, who has been adapting to the openweights since, recorded some notable achievements in 2025.
There was a European bronze won in the men’s double with Konan Pazzaia, a World Championship bronze in the men’s double with Philip Doyle, and he also became the inaugural mixed double world champion with Mags Cremen.
This current season has been his first competing in the openweight single and he finished ninth overall in World Cup I in Seville. Mags Cremen and Izzy Clements are others in the current team adapting from that same switch from light to open classes.
Not all of the crews are fresh out of the bag.
Ross Corrigan and Nathan Timoney continue their partnership in the men’s pair, Imogen Magner and Natalie Long in the women’s pair while Zoë Hyde and Cremen renew a women’s double combination that medalled at World Cup 1.
That said, Amsterdam will provide a first championship measure for boats assembled more recently.
Fionnán McQuillan-Tolan, Adam Murphy, James Doran and Jack Dorney contest the men’s four, while Claire Feerick, Aisling Hayes, Emma Waters and Emma Fagan form the women’s four.
The women’s quadruple sculls brings together previous medal-winning athletes Emily Hegarty, Sophia Young, Alison Bergin and Clements into a new combination.
Martin O’Grady, Ryan Spelman, Andrew Sheehan and Pazzaia return in the men’s quadruple sculls, having gained valuable international racing experience together earlier in the season.
O’Carroll has made it abundantly clear that this meet is a means of establishing just where various athletes and crews are, and that none of the combinations are in any way final when it comes to the line-up for LA28.
Almost two more years of chopping and changing and tweaking and adapting could like ahead yet with the fours and quads in Amsterdam right now still very much unknown quantities, in particular.
Fintan McCarthy
Ross Corrigan, Nathan Timoney
Fionnán McQuillan-Tolan, Adam Murphy, James Doran, Jack Dorney
Martin O’Grady, Ryan Spelman, Andrew Sheehan, Konan Pazzaia
Fiona Murtagh
Imogen Magner, Natalie Long
Zoë Hyde, Margaret “Mags” Cremen
Claire Feerick, Aisling Hayes, Emma Waters, Emma Fagan
Emily Hegarty, Sophia Young, Alison Bergin, Isobel “Izzy” Clements
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