A vulnerable champion: Fintan McCarthy on living up to life as an Olympic hero

McCarthy didn’t later regret that openness. Not in the slightest. He just didn’t want one particular strand of introspection to supersede every other crevice he visited and explored.

The request, though politely put, was not needed. To narrow portrayal of the conversation would have been an injustice to his candour. But neither could we ignore those tears he has allowed himself to shed since arriving home from Paris. 

They, after all, provide the perfect pontoon from which to push out onto water the changed and more comfortable Fintan McCarthy now sat at the stern of the boat.

The colour of the medal brought home from the French capital was the same as that carried off the plane from Tokyo three years earlier. The neck around which it dangled is different and deeper.

***

Ireland’s five-ring participants were back in each other’s company on November 11. 

They gathered at the Clayton Hotel on Burlington Road for the Team Ireland Centenary Ball. Fintan had not far to travel. He’s been based in Dublin since he and Paul O’Donovan returned home from their latest gold-medal push. 

Proximity to the Sport Ireland campus as he begins the transition from lightweight to heavyweight rower was one factor in the relocation. 

Another was the post-Olympic corporate opportunities and a peek inside the door of what life might look like once the boat has been parked up for good. Recently turned 28, he’s tuned in to the necessity that the next four years move him forward not only as an athlete.

Anyway, all the rowers were up from Cork for the Olympic Ball. There was a second-gettogether over lunch the following day. The breeze shot in the most familiar of company. Messing and laughing and living.

Time eventually came for the Cork crew to get on the road home. Fintan, now resident under a different roof, returned to his apartment out Castleknock direction. Once inside the door, he sat on his bed and began to cry.

“Just realising how big a part of my life these people have become because it kind of creeps up on you,” he explains.

“You are together every day, so a rapport is slowly building, and then all of a sudden they are your best friends. That all hit me at

once, and being like, fuck, I need to realise this in the moment and be so appreciative of it because it is going to end one day. I went a long, long time without ever crying, and then since Paris (clicks fingers). Once you let it out, you can’t get it back in. I don’t mind that. I kind of like being vulnerable with people. You build trust that way.”

That desire to be present and to savour connections has a source. At the end of September, his uncle, Will, passed away. He was only 49.

The younger brother of Fintan’s dad Tom, Will had been sick for a time with lymphoma. Still, the suddenness at which he went downhill in the end came as a significant and unwelcome shock to all who knew and loved him. 

Fintan and other family members flew to London to be with Will in his final days. By that point, though, his uncle was in a coma. An even more difficult goodbye.

The last time they were in each other’s company happy and hearty was Christmas 2023. Will was over visiting. Fintan was in full prep mode for the Olympic year pending. Once the dinner was digested each afternoon, the living room became a live-in gym. The admiration was less for his nephew’s talent on the water and more his application on dry land.

Will’s poor health meant he could not get to Paris. The pair spoke on the phone before, during, and after the Games. Fintan never tired of hearing the joy in his uncle’s voice.

Every now and then, Will’s passing comes at him from out of nowhere and lands a sizeable dunt. Three months on, he can’t say he has fully processed the loss of an individual he was quite close with. What he clings tight to is how he made his uncle feel when they shared the same space.

“He used to always say how proud he was of not even the results, but of watching us working towards something. I don’t think it’s particularly inspiring, but he would always say that watching someone go after what they love so much was.

“It gave me an awful lot of comfort thinking back to the time we did spend together, how positive it was, and remembering him as he was really made me be like, ‘fuck, I want to make people feel like this’. I want to make sure that, whether I am good at rowing or not, that people are glad to be around me and have good memories.

“It did put into perspective that it is not all about rowing, which I knew it wasn’t. And not that you have to, but I want people to come away from being part of my life, or me being part of theirs, and being like, that was valuable. I don’t know why that is, but it probably goes back to trying to make everyone happy.”

***

Further on into the bowl of soup and toasted sandwiches almost put away, Fintan is recalling his post-Tokyo experience. It wasn’t as enjoyable as it should have been for a 24-year-old who packed a gold medal into his suitcase when departing his debut Games. 

It wasn’t as enjoyable an experience as it should have been because Fintan was far too caught up in how he appeared to everyone else and how everyone else perceived him. He’s not that person anymore. He cares less about how you and I view him.

He repeatedly stresses such across the table. And yet his earlier comments about wanting to leave a positive mark on those who cross his path would seem to contradict this stance.

There is no contradiction. Fintan McCarthy knows the person and the Olympic champion he is and wants to be. Three years ago, when thrust centre stage, his 24-year-old self was counting on a rowing medal to shape him as a person. Reality quickly taught him differently.

“I was delighted to have the gold, but I thought I would feel a bit better about myself,” he says of Tokyo glory.

“When we won, I was like to myself, I am still the same person, I still think this, this, and this about myself. You think it is going to give you this major confidence and this ability to live your life as an Olympic gold medalist, but you just go back to being normal.”

The normality of his story is what unsettled him when welcomed home. There was no gripping tale to his ascension. This was no triumph against the odds. 

Adversity and him were unacquainted. His membership of Skibbereen Rowing Club, and ability with an oar in either hand, meant he had a front row seat to the ascension of Paul and Gary O’Donovan, an ascension that culminated in Rio silver and Ireland’s first ever Olympic rowing medal.

Fintan simply followed their path and succeeded in claiming a seat in the boat that went one podium step higher five years later.

There are six grammes of gold in the most prized Olympic medal. The emotions stirred by these six grammes are infinite. To trigger insecurity in its recipient is one of the less advertised.

“I thought I was doing a bad job of being an Olympic champion because it seemed to me to be so different to what happened after Rio with Gary and Paul. I think, as well, and I know no one was doing this, but I was comparing myself a lot to the response they got,” Fintan reveals.

“I felt like I wasn’t living up to the hype of an Olympic champion. I just tried really hard in rowing for a few years and now I am suddenly here; it is not really a great story or cool story. Everything outside of rowing, I am not built for this, I am not good at this. Everyone thinks I am really boring. These are things you tell yourself when you are in that frame of mind.”

The Irish public had lapped up the O’Donovan brothers five years earlier. The Irish public had fallen over in stitches at the two lads’ West Cork wit, their cheekiness, and their ability to pull one-liners quicker than they pulled from A to B.

Fintan wasn’t, isn’t, an O’Donovan brother. 

The response from those outside the rowing community of ‘who’s your man, is it not the brothers again’ he was expecting and prepared for. He’d heard and digested the same commentary, albeit on a much smaller scale, when first partnering with Paul in 2019.

But being familiar with that narrative is much different than having to address the narrative. That latter piece he found “so hard” given the dislodged Gary O’Donovan had been a “huge part” of his journey and training.

“And you really don’t know how to navigate it when people are asking you that because it was quite close between us that year in 2021. We were all training together right up until the holding camp, so for both of us, it was probably really difficult. And it is easy for me to say that because I was in the boat.”

***

The days, weeks, and months post-Olympics are spent out of the boat and away from the hurt locker. The pause button is pressed on the high-performance existence.

Ask the 28-year-old what he got up to when leaving behind the French capital and he tells you he scratched his Taylor Swift itch. Yes, Fintan McCarthy is a Swiftie. The initial plan was to catch her Eras tour in Vienna. When an attack threat to the American pop star saw those Vienna dates cancelled, he ended up seeing her in London, twice.

There were loads of other bits squeezed in and ticked off. He got back around to his Masters in Performance Coaching with Setanta College.

 All the while, his fitness went south. There were a lot of Monday and Tuesday promises to start back into some semblance of a routine. There were a lot of promises not kept. There were a lot of 7am alarms put on snooze.

Departure from his high-performance existence did not faze him. Three years ago, a lesser departure from his everyday conditioned state had reduced him to frantic fits of soul-searching. 

This latest contrast reinforces the one constant theme running through the now finished bowl of soup and toasted sandwiches. Fintan McCarthy was ready for whatever life threw at him post-Paris. He was not so three years earlier.

“If I was in this situation back in Tokyo, I don’t know how it would have gone. At least back then I was at a level of fitness where it wasn’t too far from the brink, so I could always pull it back. But now I am in that position, I am not worried about will it be OK because I know what it takes to get there again, and I know it will take more than ever before because I have come so far from it.

“But from September to December of 2021, it would be a week of, ‘what am I doing, this isn’t good enough, this isn’t going to win me more medals, I’ll never be successful again’, and then jumping into the camps, doing the training, coming home from camp, and another week of ‘oh that was only two weeks, what are you going to do next, you will get unfit again if you don’t train’. I was going back and forth between being OK and not being OK. A crisis of ‘like was this a fluke’.

“In 2022, I was getting a bit better in the single, which was a big confidence boost, and would have helped with the ‘who’s the other guy’ thing because obviously for me, Paul is such a hero. I did feel a lot like I was kinda letting the side down a little bit and we could be so much faster if only I was a bit better. When I got a PB on the rowing machine and won nationals, that definitely brought me up a gear in terms of feeling OK with being in that situation and knowing I deserved it.

“Pre-Tokyo, I was always chasing something. I was always like, when I get there and when I do this, then I’ll be good. But I can recognise now that that’s not good, whereas before it was the end goal.”

Pre-Paris, now there’s a song of turmoil and mental angst Taylor would have no problem putting lyrics to. A ready-made No.1 hit.

The hits started rolling this month last year. He returned home from camp and tested positive for covid. Went back out to another Seville camp the following month and fell ill. The body was simply run down from the training load.

Instead of allowing a temporary recharge, he trained through and injured his back. The diagnosis was a herniated disc. The back never let up. But neither did Fintan. He’d put down three or four days of solid rowing work and then the back would roar. 

Once the back began to roar, he was shifted onto the bike. Once the back quietened, he went back rowing. A vicious cycle spinning uncontrollably. Constant damage control.

At the end of April, a chest infection knocked him clean out. For three weeks, he was laid up in the house in Ballincollig. No rowing, no cycling, no training, no nothing. Beyond listening to Taylor’s new album, he hadn’t the energy to do much more.

“I was in bed with a 40-degree fever. The girls were on camp, so it was just me in the house and I didn’t know what I was doing. I got my mam to come up from Skibb. I was literally going to go into A&E because I didn’t know what was wrong with me. My lungs were just full for three weeks.”

The chasing, setbacks, and further chasing all reached a dispiriting head at the following month’s Lucerne World Cup. Paul and Fintan finished second to the Swiss in their semi-final. There was clear water between the boats. Neither of the Irish lads had held back. They were all out. Their all-out, two months from Paris, had come up well short.

Fintan went for a walk around the Swiss city that night. He repeatedly asked himself if he had messed up their Olympic defence. Another crisis of self to add to the list.

“That was a big one. We came straight off the water after the semi-final and I said to Paul, ‘do you think we will get them tomorrow’? A kind of, ‘how are you feeling’, because I was doing my best, but at that time it wasn’t good enough. I was hoping he was maybe saving something.

“He just said, ‘I think it will be hard [to catch them]’. Paul is very honest. I knew the fact he wasn’t saying, ‘yeah, we probably will’, that I had fucked it basically.

“I know he didn’t hold that against me or blame me, he was just giving an honest assessment. I didn’t go around thinking, ‘oh Paul is mad at me’. I was just like, ‘fuck, why is this happening to me, we could be winning, we could be going into Paris with a better idea of where we are’.

“In the moment, I was cursing it because I felt so stressed. I never felt so defeated [after that semi-final].”

The following day’s final began to refill his cup. They finished third, the Swiss boat just 0.18 ahead of them, with Italy first home. The margin was already being clawed back. Their gold-medal cause was not lost.

Their last lengths to Paris were without interruption. Once the desired medal was again falling from their neck, Fintan’s three weeks in bed took on a transformed complexion. 

The rest afforded to his up-to-then creaking back was enough to keep the body sufficiently sellotaped to the end of summer.

“Probably did need to hit rock bottom, but maybe not so dramatically. Looking back, I am pretty proud and grateful because I learned a lot from those races and that time.”

Their lightweight legacy secured and the lightweight class discontinued for LA, the most challenging Olympic cycle awaits them. 

Fintan McCarthy — the person — has never been as ready.