Jordan Conroy: 'I was in a low and during it I was lost'
CHARACTER: Rugby 7's player Jordan Conroy poses for a portrait during the European Games team day for Team Ireland – Krakow 2023 at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Blanchardstown, Dublin. Pic: Harry Murphy/Sportsfile
Jordan Conroy doesn’t demur when it’s put to him that he is in his prime. He’s 29 now, more than a decade on from the day he first held a rugby ball and eight seasons into his unfolding story as a player with the Ireland sevens squad.
Renowned for his turn of pace and a killer finish, Conroy scored his one hundredth try in his World Series career against Australia in the Canada leg of the World Series last March. Plenty more scores have spilled beyond that narrow boundary.
There were the early days when the team scraped its way up from the bottom of the sevens barrel via various backwaters. Scores at European tournaments and World Cups, although not at the Olympics two years ago.
More on that later.
But his idea of prime hasn’t anything to do with the physical. It’s more the advances he has made as a person on the back of a whirlwind eight-month period that incorporated those Tokyo Games and a star turn on Dancing With The Stars.
“I feel like I'm more in my prime mentally. I’ve had a growth shift mentally. I was 27 then and two years can make a lot of difference. I'm a lot calmer, a lot more assured in myself in terms of my ability and what I can offer, but it took a lot to get to that place.”Â
He took stock after those chapters and realised that there were a lot of things taken for granted. Some naivety with it. There is more of the critical thinker to him now and he understands that things don’t last forever.
Conroy took time out from rugby to pursue the dance detour and the RTÉ show made him realise that there was more to life than an oval ball. He matured, basically, but there was no escaping the comedown after the highs of the Olympics and the TV show.
Post-Games blues are not a new phenomenon.
A study published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine spoke to 394 UK Olympic and Paralympic athletes from across 29 sports and found that almost one in four reported various levels of psychological distress after their Games experiences.
Under-performance was one contributing factor but some medallists found that success led to an emptiness all of its own. Other triggers were a loss of profile, the readjustment to home life, injury issues, a lack of routine and an absence of motivation.
“I was in a low and during it I was lost, I was in a dark, grey, muggy place,” says Conroy. “I had the rugby but I wasn't enjoying it and it just took a lot out of me. That experience and other experiences helped me build into the man I am now and I use them to see can I apply them to life and to other people.
“In that way I feel that I've grown and I see myself mentoring the younger lads now a little bit, and that was never my thing. I was always a standalone guy. It was, 'I bring this to the team and that's my job'. But now I know there's more to it than that, on and off the pitch, because I never thought I'd be able to do that.”Â
It’s this more aware Conroy that pitches up at the Henryk Reyman Stadium in Krakow for three days, starting tomorrow, as the Irish men’s sevens team goes about emulating their female counterparts and booking their spots for Paris 2024.
They look well positioned to do it on the back of some impressive performances and results on the HSBC World Series tour, and on their last outing, in the Algarve, when they twice beat a GB team likely to be their main rival in Poland.
This isn’t quite a last-chance saloon. There is one more repechage event next summer, on the doorstep of the Olympics themselves, but that was the door they slipped through last time and it left them drained for the tournament proper just three weeks later.
Conroy remembers the eerie stillness in the tunnel in that last-ditch qualifier in Monaco before each game as the players digested the import of what was to come. That and his own shaking as the nerves tried to escape his body.
The knock-on effect was a desperately disappointing Games with defeats to South Africa and the USA and a pyrrhic victory against Kenya to finish it off. They were, said Conroy, simply “burnt out” and they are desperate to avoid a repeat.
That means winning these European Games outright come Tuesday night and he is confident that a side good enough to claim silver at the World Championships last year is much further on now than the one that failed to fire in Japan.
"We've come so far that I'd say we would absolutely smash our older versions,” he smiled. “It's been a happy growth.”
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