THE 33RD OLYMPIAD but the first O’Lympiad. Seven days, seven medals. On the first day, Mona McSharry touched the wall and found herself on the right side of a single hundredth of a second.
She had flirted with quitting the sport a couple of years earlier and yet here she was, an Olympic bronze medallist, validating everything she had endured and also signalling to the rest of us that something was stirring. On the second day, Daniel Wiffen was nervous. The guy who once went to a sports psychologist to be told he didn’t need a sports psychologist suddenly felt a prick of self-doubt.
He needed reassurance and so he needed to find a pool. High performance coach Jon Rudd found one, and once Wiffen was in the pool, he asked Rudd if he had his watch, and would he time his next 100m. Rudd reluctantly agreed.
Wiffen’s target was 1:02, but someone got in his way in his final 50m, whom he had to swim around. He hit the wall and asked Rudd for the time. It was 1:01.
01. “It’s done”, said Wiffen. “We’ve won.
” Hours later Daniel Wiffen stood on top of an Olympic podium, and Ireland’s most easily confident Olympian ended the day as he started it, caught out by his own emotion. This time, there were tears leaking from his eyes. On the third day, Kellie Harrington fixed another post-it note to the wall of her room in the athletes village.
Her wife, Mandy, sent her a support package that included a card, photos, post-it notes and blu-tack. Every day Harrington wrote a posit.