Gary and Paul O'Donovan remain huge figures in the Irish sporting landscape, with their recent gold in the World Championships endearing them even further to the nation.
Having captured an unexpected silver medal in the 2016 Olympics, they have very much been in the public eye. Gold in Tokyo 2020 now has to be the aim for the pair, and they seem well on track to accomplishing that goal.
Rowing is growing as a sport in Ireland, largely thanks to their achievements. Both were speaking on the Matt Cooper show on Today FM today, and Paul said that they made the choice to concentrate exclusively on rowing at quite an early age.
We did a little bit of Gaelic football for a while, and a bit of rugby, and we were always playing soccer in the schoolyard. But I think around the ages of 13 or 14 we were really really enjoying the rowing and the guys we were doing it with.
So we just made the decision ourselves that we wanted to give up the other sports and just focus completely on the rowing.
While their journey would eventually take them to the summit of their sport, that was the furthest thing on their mind when starting out. When asked if they always had Olympic glory on their mind, Gary said that their goals were much smaller.
When you're 14 years old it is a complete and utter lunatic of a dream to have!
In them days we weren’t thinking the Olympics was the big one we wanted to do. It was just like ‘we want to go to the banter regatta in two weeks time, let’s train hard for that’, or the regatta in Fermoy or the regatta in Carlow.
Our dad used to drive us to all these regattas, and he was coaching us at the time. The next biggest things for us at the time was those little regattas.
Indeed their father seemed to be a huge influence on the two brothers. When race wins began to inevitably come their way in the underage rowing circuit, Paul recalled how their father had a very clever way of ensuring that the pair did not let the success go to their heads.
At the underage level, our dad used to enter us into our own age bracket and the one over. So even though we were winning our own age bracket, we were getting a good beating from guys that were a bit bigger, a year older and stronger.
So I think if we were just left in our own age bracket and winning all the time you can become very confident and a bit complacent. So we were always getting beaten and learning from that.
It was something to motivate us, ‘oh we will try and beat the bigger older guys,’ that just made us really competitive.
You can listen to the full interview here.
