What is your role within the support team, and what are your primary responsibilities?
I am the Head of Performance Analysis at the Sport Ireland Institute and leading the Performance Analysis team for Team Ireland based at the Paris Games. There are two main roles I have.
The first one is setting up the performance analysis suite for Team Ireland in the Olympic Village here in Paris which is being used across seven sports, and is really just to give the analysts a space to work with the coaches.
The second part for me is working in the boxing team as performance analyst. That revolves mainly around the coaches, the tactical plans, we go through hours of footage on the opponents before each bout and analyse them tactically.
How does your role contribute to the overall performance of the athletes?
In competition as soon as the draw is made and we know our opponent we’ll dive into a catalogue of footage that we’d have and share that with the coaches. My role then is to facilitate that analysis, make up footage to be used for short feedback sessions, or review sessions on the day of a bout, before a bout, we’ll facilitate all of that with the coaches.
When the coaches are looking at the next opponent’s footage for the next day, I’ll then be analysing the next potential opponent’s footage for a day ahead of time.
We go through that footage and distil it down into a pre-bout review with each of the boxers, so I’m always working a day ahead and the core piece for that is in competition to give time back to the coaches.
How did you first become involved in this field, and what inspired you to pursue this career?
I’ve always been massively into my sport, and I first got involved in boxing around 15 years ago when the high-performance system in Ireland was only establishing itself, but I was involved from the start really and have been on the boat ever since.
Being here at the Games, it’s a very special place, I feel very honoured and proud to contribute some small element to the team. It really is a special place here in the village, and to see athletes from all over the world coming and going, the elation and excitement, and the grief and turmoil.
What’s something most people probably wouldn’t realise about elite athletes?
It’s not very glamorous, it’s all about having the ability to grind things out and do the boring things well. It’s funny, I remember when Kellie Harrington won a couple of nights ago, we were in the food hall, while Kellie was getting all of her anti-doping tests done.
She would’ve still been at the venue with the doctors at that stage, but we went to the food hall with the coaches at around 1am, and we saw the Olympic sprint final winner Julien Alfred there. She was from St Lucia, she was just sitting there like anyone else in the food hall, she had won the 100m a couple of days before, and she won silver that night, just sat there in the food hall.
It was all very mundane, it goes to show being successful at that top level of your sport isn’t always as glamorous as others may think.
How do you help athletes prepare for their events?
So I suppose for me I’d say 80-90 per cent of my work would be specifically dealing with coaches. Specifically for the athletes what we would do is, for say someone like Grainne Walsh, we spend time with the coaches reviewing opponents, then distil that down, it could be 20 bouts of footage, from there we’ll pick and choose different elements of what’s relevant and then distil that down to maybe 60-90 seconds of footage for coaches, which would be used as a pre-bout review.
That’s my role, to facilitate that session and work with the coaches on the morning of a bout, or the night before. At the Games I wouldn’t get to see an awful lot of the athletes, for the first week I didn’t even get to go to the venue, I was here in the village working a day ahead of the coaches.
Sport Ireland Institute is the official performance support delivery partner to the Olympic Federation of Ireland
