Chasing Olympic qualification with the opening ceremony just 91 days away is tough enough but for this Irish triathlete there’s a whole other world of complications.
Racking up close to 24 hours of training weekly in our wettest winter in years while navigating competitions across multiple time-zones and conditions can throw up the sort of logistical ambushes that would melt the most level of heads.
Elizabeth Carr, the current Irish number one in World Triathlon’s female rankings, lost virtually all of last year to injury so, since Christmas, has been locked in an intense cross-continent battle for qualification points.
She needed three flights to get to South Africa earlier this month and got in to Port Elizabeth on a Thursday night, with two days of recovery planned before her latest Continental Cup race.
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Her bike?
Nowhere to be found.
Some stern words with an airline saw it arrive next morning which was fortunate, given the organisers then decided to bring the race forward to Saturday to avoid an incoming storm.
It blew hard anyway, the sea so lively that the warm-up was restricted to just 150m from shore but Carr finished sixth and was relieved it went ahead.
Inclement weather means races sometimes get shortened or cancelled and any abbreviation of an Olympic distance race like that (1.5km swim/40km bike/10km run) automatically halves all the qualification points.
Her South African escapade sounds enough to throw even the most seasoned international. Carr is still a relative newcomer at this level but is not easily flustered. When you’ve been a Platoon Commander of the 118 Infantry Battalion on peacekeeping duty with UNIFIL in Lebanon in 2021 you tend not to sweat the small stuff.
Part of her job was commanding 30 soldiers for a two-month block on a tiny outpost right on the ‘blue line’. When they went off the base, once-a-day, to exercise on the same one-mile stretch, a tank always had to be on standby.
A captain in the Irish army, Carr (29) is usually based in the Curragh Camp but, since February, was granted special leave to pursue her Olympic dream.
‘Adapt and overcome’ is the military motto that’s been drilled into her.
“Our training means we learn to adapt and overcome whatever is thrown at us because you just have to do the job that you’re meant to do, no matter what,” she explains.
She clearly loves her job and equally appreciates the Army’s support of her sporting goals: “It’s a fantastic and varied career with challenges that have really helped me to grow, both as a leader in work and as a sportsperson.”
Originally a runner with Mullingar Harriers who represented Ireland at schools’ cross-country, she initially graduated in sports science and health from DCU.
“I never really had a breakout year in college, I’d say my best year actually came when I started triathlon in my final year,” she explains.
She showed enough promise, from just one year’s racing, to go to the World Under-23 Championships in September 2017. It proved something of a baptism of fire. It wasn’t just her first international but her first race over the Olympic distance.
She had a ‘mechanical’ [bike problem] on the difficult looped course and got lapped which, at that level, means you have to bow out, missing the chance to run which is her strongest element.
Two weeks later Carr started in the Defence Forces’ challenging cadet programme, one of 17 women in a class of 107, of which 70 graduated 17 months later.
The physical demands were very different – “you’re weighted down with gear, out in every weather, it’s just constant go for the first year” – but no problem to her so it was mentally that she was most challenged.
Once Covid, her tour of duty and promotion to captain were ticked off by the end of 2021, she set her mind on Olympic qualification but an Achilles injury flared up in June 2022 and took almost a year to solve. The pain and inflammation just kept recurring despite multiple opinions and treatments.
When a teammate suggested a specialist in Galway for one last-ditch effort she “didn’t know who or what to believe. At that stage my trust in people was just on the floor”.
He diagnosed that her plantaris tendon, a tiny sliver of a thing that runs parallel to the Achilles, had somehow fused on to it and removed a small section of it last May.
She was back on a stationary bike within two weeks, back in a pool within a month and back in a race four months later, winning a sprint ‘duathlon’ in Youghal before getting in two Continental Cups last November.
Despite a crash she made top 10 in a sprint (half of all Olympic distances) in Tunis and finished second at full Olympic distance in Agadir.
The problem though is that time is against her.
As a developing athlete she competed mainly in Africa & Americas’ Continental Cups (World Triathlon’s second tier), chasing Paris 2024 qualification through a new ‘flag’ competition, which is essentially a race for the European wild-card.
A trio of athletes from Turkey, Slovakia and Slovenia are currently ahead of her so she’s desperately hoping that they do so well that they qualify automatically, leaving her next in line.
Since February she has won a sprint event in Zimbabwe, finished seventh at full Olympic distance in Cuba, fifth at the same level in Mexico and sixth last time out.
Seven months ago Carr didn’t have an international ranking. Now she’s broken into the top 70 in Europe and ranks 133rd in the world.
The odds are still stacked against her because qualification is based on an amalgam of best results over two seasons.
“But when you get back you don’t like to put any kind of barriers on yourself. Even if it is a long shot it’s like my body’s okay and, after the mental toll of an injury, that’s huge.
“The hardest thing was not having any control over it. Any athlete will tell you how frustrating that is, that it [recovery] is not correlated to the effort you put in, that it doesn’t matter how hard you’re working or how dedicated you are.”
She is the eldest of four children in a family that understand the challenges of elite sport. Her dad Tom played for and managed the Dublin footballers while her younger brother Simon (24) has competed on the equally gruelling international tennis circuit since his teens.
He had to go to the UK to find a specialist for a back injury and doesn’t, she empathises, have the benefit of her ‘carding’ grant (€18,000 plus access to all the facilities/ancillary services at the Sport Ireland Institute in Abbottstown) which her international performances last winter earned her.
Yes, Paris is a very long shot.
Given how light her triathlon tachograph is, LA in 2028 is a much more realistic Olympic ambition but Carr’s instinct, by genetics and Army training, is to battle to the last. To adapt and overcome.
She flew Dublin-Madrid-Caracas on Tuesday to race in La Guaira, Venezuela today (Fri, 26th) and will get in a few more Continental Cups and a World Cup in Uzbekistan before the qualification door slams.
“I’m giving it my all anyway for the next while and we’ll see where that takes me,” she says optimistically, just grateful to be back in this particular fight.
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