Philip Doyle may be the most invisible 6’6 tall double world championship medal winning sportsman that Ireland has ever produced. That’s all set to change as he and partner Daire Lynch won the bronze medal in the Men’s Double Sculls event in rowing at the 20204 Paris Olympics.
Doyle is in his second wave of success, with world medals in 2019 and 2023 being split by a global pandemic, a disastrous trip to the Tokyo Olympics and a change in partner. A relative latecomer to rowing – he only took it up while studying in Queens – Doyle only made his first Irish squad aged 25 in 2018. He was paired with rising star Ronan Byrne and the double started to improve their results into the 2019 season with the hope of qualifying for Tokyo 2020.
Doyle and Byrne excelled in the Austrian lakes and won Ireland’s first men’s heavyweight world championships medal since 1975 with a superb silver. They were to travel to Tokyo as a strong medal contender – then the pandemic hit.
Doyle, a qualified doctor, was called into action while the sporting world was paused. Sessions with Byrne were done over video and the relationship between the two of them became “delicate”, as Doyle called it.
When the Olympics eventually went ahead in 2021, the dynamics had shifted but expectations from the outside were still high. They finished 4th of four in the opening heat, 3rd of four in the repechage and last in the semifinal. A 4th place in the B final left them 10th overall. It was the last time they’d race together.
28 July 2021; Ronan Byrne, left, and Philip Doyle of Ireland after finishing 4th in their Men's Double Sculls final B at the Sea Forest Waterway during the 2020 Tokyo Summer Olympic Games in Tokyo, Japan. Photo by Seb Daly/Sportsfile
While Doyle attending to his medical career in 2020, Ronan Byrne was partnered with Daire Lynch. Lynch had recently returned from studying in Yale in the United States and was the same age as Byrne. They won the European under-23 title, and more impressively won bronze at the senior European championships that year. As Doyle and Byrne reunited for the Tokyo Games, Lynch went back to the US to work.
After Tokyo, Byrne left the high performance unit (he has since returned and has excelled in coastal rowing) and Doyle contemplated retirement.
2022 saw Rowing Ireland try several partners for Doyle and in 2023, Lynch came home for a shot at the Olympics. They were 4th at the European Championships after only a month together. Doyle had paused his medical career and had relocated to the national rowing centre in Cork to work with Lynch and the high performance coaches.
They were rewarded with another storming performance at the world championships in Belgrade. The Banbridge/Clonmel combination winning bronze behind experienced multiple-medal winners from Croatia and Netherlands. As a bonus, they had qualified for the 2024 Olympics.
2024 hasn’t been smooth running for the combination but they showed signs of a return to form by winning the final World Cup event of the season. None of the major medal contenders were present for that, so we still needed to see if they could reproduce their best form in Paris.
It's fair to say that they produced the goods.
A win in the opening heat exorcised the demons of Tokyo and they followed that up with a semi final win to firmly put themselves down as medal contenders for Thursday’s final. The two crews they avoided in the heats and semis, Romania and Netherlands, were always ahead of the Irish but a superb last 500m saw them overtake the United States and win a terrific bronze medal.
The first ever medal won by male heavyweight rowers for Ireland.
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