What level of ambition does it take to pluck yourself from everything you know for a notion? What bold thinking requires you to hold the belief that in less than a year you can become an Olympic athlete in sevens rugby?
These are questions Vikki Wall is answering. The former women’s footballer of the year in Gaelic football is currently embedded in the Irish sevens team. They are trying to build a squad to reach the podium at the Olympic Games next year in Paris. Building a Wall.
Ireland have already qualified. The hopeful, not unrealistic challenge set is a medal and for Wall to turn her football skillset, acquired growing up in Meath, into an Olympic standard rugby player.
As experiments go it is a real time, week-by-week unfolding drama. If a documentary team has not yet been positioned to record her journey from football to Aussie Rules and into the Olympic firmament, then more the pity.
Wall’s adventure is no less than a great, magical, dreamy but measured punt, and one with which the programme has prospered in the past. The history of Irish sevens has been one of repurposing athletes from other sports into international standard rugby players. And they have been excellent.
[ The door is open for Irish World Cup rugby players to chase an Olympic dreamOpens in new window ]
GAA has been a favourite shopping destination for several reasons. Players like Wall are athletic, comfortable with the intensity and heavy contact aspect of the game and have developed the naturally assured hand-to-eye coordination of a lifetime playing ball.
Still, it’s a mountainous ask for one of the country’s most accomplished team athletes to perfect and absorb the nuances of forcefully hitting rucks, passing off both sides, running lines, the physical challenges, the tactics, the technical differences, the laws and the general understanding of a game. Who can learn a sport that lasts for 14 minutes in a matter of months?
The challenge speaks to Wall’s inherent abilities, impressive enough to allow South African coach Allan Temple-Jones to believe that project Vikki is worth pursuing.
A two-time All-Ireland winner, Wall left her AFLW club North Melbourne to join the sevens set-up at the beginning of August. The first match of the Paris Olympics takes place on July 28th. She is now a contracted player and has been involved in development competitions in Elche, Spain and Dublin with the first of the World Series events scheduled for Dubai in less than two weeks.
The women’s sevens squad for Dubai will be announced next week, although a development team will also travel to compete in the International Invitational Tournament, therefore providing all players in the programme with access to early-season game time.
“I got a rude awakening, definitely, in the first few minutes, it was tough,” said Wall this week speaking about her first rugby outing.
Current captain Lucy Mulhall is likely to be a useful sounding board. Mulhall played Gaelic Football with Wicklow before deciding to take up rugby after seeing the success of the Ireland women’s 15s side. She joined the sevens squad in 2015, making her debut in Kazan that year. Hers was a quick transition.
Hannah Tyrell played intercounty football with Dublin before she joined the Irish sevens programme and went on to international rugby before switching back to football in 2021.
Cora Staunton is best known as a Gaelic footballer, winning four All-Irelands with Mayo. She has also been an All Star on eleven occasions. In addition, Staunton played other football codes at a senior level, including soccer and won an FAI Cup winners medal when Mayo ladies beat UCD in the 2006 Richmond Park final. In 2018 she made her Australian rules football debut in the AFLW competition for the Greater Western Sydney Giants, establishing herself by 2022 as one of the league’s all-time great goalkickers.
Former Irish outhalf Nora Stapleton attended UCD on a soccer scholarship and was a prominent member of the university team that won three successive FAI Women’s Cup finals between 2002 and 2004. She also played GAA for the Donegal senior football team and from 2010 made 50 appearances for the Irish rugby side. Switching sports at a high level is not uncommon in Ireland.
However, Wall’s challenge is of a different dimension given the speed at which she must make the transition and the level she is expected to attain from a standing start of zero hours of rugby. The base level of the Irish squad is also higher than when Mulhall transitioned, which means the distance to travel is greater.
A high wire act, one that injury could stop dead, it’s also a fascinating study in ambition and audacity. Just what allure do the five rings hold and what magical quality does a chance to become an Olympian or win an Olympic medal hold over an athlete? Enough to compel them to abandon a professional contract in Australia?
“Yeah, it’s been tough. It has been tough, a massive transition,” said Wall.
Filling the unforgiving minute. Chasing the dream. Like any fantastical, super-sized idea, it goes beyond normal measure and far from Wall’s comfort zone. To open the possibility of failure to an athlete, who has always known success, is a glorious, bust-a-gut venture.
But works of brilliance come from great processes, not great ideas. The women before her know that. Temple-Jones knows that. Undaunted and fearless, over the next six months Wall will too.
