On the flight home from Shanghai last week, Fintan McCarthy was his usual self.
The World Rowing Championships were over, the Irish medal haul was hefty yet again, easy street was just a horizon away. With the season done, there was time now to down tools and give body and mind a well-earned rest.
Or maybe not.
“I actually find it quite hard,” McCarthy says, half-laughing at himself. “I’m always one to jump right into planning and deconstructing the season and seeing where we could have done a bit better. I’ve kind of just always been that way.
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“So I was jumping around to all the coaches on the plane home and all the guys to see what the plans are for next year.”
McCarthy won his fourth and fifth world championship medals in Shanghai, taking gold in the mixed double sculls alongside Mags Cremen and bronze in the men’s double sculls alongside Philip Doyle.
It means that in his senior career in an Irish singlet, he has been to four world championships and two Olympics and brought home six gold medals and a bronze.
His place among the greats of Irish sport is written in stone.
And yet, as is the way, you’d have been forgiven for blinking and missing McCarthy’s gaiscaí - heroic triumph - last weekend altogether. You were watching the Ryder Cup. Or you were at the NFL game in Croke Park. Or you were buried deep under the sorrowful mysteries of Reuben Amorim’s United. Or your county championship was hitting the semi-final stage. Or the URC was back. Most likely, there was a combination of some or all of these to grab your attention.
But out in the world, Irish sport keeps rolling. In the past three weeks alone, Irish athletes have won world medals in rowing, athletics, boxing, cycling and para-athletics.
On Tuesday night in New Delhi, Orla Comerford won the 200m in the T13 category at the World Para Athletics Championships, completing the sprint double for the week. By doing so, she brought the number of senior Irish medals at world and European championships this year to 45.
[ Double gold for Ireland on final day of World Rowing ChampionshipsOpens in new window ]
It’s only the first week of October and already we have seen newly-crowned Irish world champions in rowing, boxing, para cycling and para athletics. As well as European champions in athletics, track cycling and surfing. Not to mention podium finishes on the world stage in sports as wide and varied as mountain biking and show jumping, hammer-throwing and sailing, para swimming and heptathlon.
The medal tally for 2025 will come in broadly similar to the past two non-Olympic years (44 in 2022, 46 in 2023). It won’t reach the heights of the 64 senior medals won in 2024 but that’s mostly down to the fact that there are more competitions in an Olympic year, and therefore more opportunities. Add in another 55 medals won by Irish athletes below senior level and any way you look at it, 2025 has been a good year. Another one.
So where has it all gone right? As ever, there’s no one answer. Just as there was never one answer when things were going badly.
That said, money is never a bad place to start. Sport Ireland was able to secure €27 million in government funding for high performance sport in 2025. It’s on track to be €30 million a year by 2027. Go back a decade and the total funding for high performance sport in the Rio Olympic cycle (2013 to 2016) was only €31.1 million.
“Money is important but it only gets you to the table,” says Paul McDermott, director of high performance at Sport Ireland. “The critical thing is that we kept investing in the programmes across the various sports post-London and through Rio. And then after Rio, we got a bit of extra money.
[ Kate O’Connor: The making of a world heptathlon medal winnerOpens in new window ]
“The bare bones programmes were invested in and now you’re seeing the results of sustained investment over time. There are good coaches around, the Institute of Sport is doing well. There are plenty of people involved who know what’s what. It is great to see the results this year.”
Notably, the fine results have come despite so many of the headline acts from Paris last summer stepping back. Daniel Wiffen had to pull out of the World Swimming Championships to get his appendix out. Rhys McClenaghan skipped the season to have surgery on his shoulder. Paul O’Donovan shifted his focus to his medical studies. Kellie Harrington’s last fight was at Rolland Garros in August 2024. Rhasidat Adeleke missed the world championships through injury.
That’s four Olympic gold medallists and the most exciting athlete we’ve had in a generation out of the picture and Irish sport hasn’t missed a beat. A post-Paris lull would have been understandable in those circumstances. It can only be a good thing that it hasn’t happened.
“The year after the Olympics is always a very important year because it’s so vital that you sustain the momentum of an Olympics,” McDermott says. “What is particularly pleasing is that there are a few new faces to carry on that momentum. We’re not relying on the same people who did it in Paris.
“You have Patsy Joyce in boxing, Kate O’Connor and Cian McPhillips in athletics. At a young level, you have people like John Shortt in swimming and Conor Kelly, who is a European under-20 champion now at 400m. You’re beginning to see emerging talent, which is really important. It’s not getting stale. It’s not the same names all the time.”
If it’s true that the money only gets you to the table, there must be other reasons why the eating is so good these days. Some of it is the advantage of being a small country – in a nation with a bigger gymnastics programme, for example, Rhys McClenaghan’s disaster in Tokyo might have seen him passed over for resources, time and energy ahead of Paris in favour of someone else.
Some of it is helped too by our own unique geography. Kate O’Connor’s rise was part-funded by the UK National Lottery. So was Daniel Wiffen’s. Ben Healy spent his early teenage years competing for Team GB before deciding at 18 to ride on his Irish passport.
O’Connor and Healy have both had an incredible 2025, from O’Connor’s multiple medals across the world to Healy’s stint in the yellow jersey in high summer and his third place in last weekend’s world championships. We didn’t exactly stumble upon them and Wiffen but the system can’t take all the credit.
When it comes right down to it, a phrase like “the system” is maybe a little misleading. Sport Ireland is the umbrella organisation that advises – and insists – on best practice across the board. But every sport is different and every governing body goes about its business in its own way. The high performance unit in boxing is small and self-contained but that model doesn’t work for athletics.
Even within sports, there’s no one-size-fits-all. There’s more scope to build a collective training environment for female cyclists than male ones, for example, purely because there are fewer professional opportunities in female cycling. Lara Gillespie has been able to continue her track career – and win European gold this year – while also finishing third on a stage of the Tour de France Femmes for UAE Team ADQ. Her male equivalent would likely have left the Irish system for a full-time contract with a pro team by now.
The key thing Sport Ireland have been able to do over the past couple of decades is to build out programmes and systems to fit the needs of each sport. The basic driving force is to make it so that when talented individuals come along, they’re given every chance to succeed. Facilities, funding, coaching, logistics, pastoral care.
When Fintan McCarthy came home from Paris, he spent a few months living in Dublin. Part of it was that there were some post-Olympics corporate opportunities on the cards for him in the city. But part of it too was the chance to be close to the Institute of Sport in Abbotstown, to begin his transition from lightweight to heavyweight in an environment that would both energise him and, for want of a better word, mind him.
“I did a couple of months training around the Institute before Christmas, which is where a lot of the support staff would be based,” he says. “I was still in contact with my coach at home a lot and my family - and obviously they’re my support system.
“But then to have people in the Institute checking in, who know what a post-Olympic year is like, who know the pitfalls, that was important. Like, most of the time they were checking in, it wasn’t from a performance perspective. They were checking in to make sure we were okay. I found that a big help.
“I know maybe some of the team that were at home might have felt a bit more isolated. Because it is hard – you go from spending months as part of a team, training together, eating together, leading into this massive occasion that your dreams are riding on and then all of a sudden you’re back home by yourself. I was glad to have some humans around.”
The Olympics hover over everything, of course.
For the people running the system, it’s a numbers game. Ireland won seven medals in Paris, along with three fourth places and medal shouts squandered in golf, showjumping and slalom canoeing. Throw in a couple of eyebrow-arching boxing decisions and they reckon they had around 15 genuine chances of medals.
For 2028, they want to be going to LA having got that number up around the 20 to 22 mark. After that, the Games will be the Games.
All going well, McCarthy will be one of those chances. He says he thinks about LA quite a bit just now. At this remove, he can allow himself that luxury. He’ll be aiming for a third gold medal in a row, something no Irish person has never done in any sport.
“It’s always there,” he says. “I think because it’s probably the end goal, for the moment anyway. When it’s so far away, you tend to go there a bit more often. When you’re close to it and it’s within touching distance, you tend to get a bit more process-driven.
“But at the moment, you’re kind of thinking and dreaming of another gold medal and kind of allowing that to shape what the next few years are going to look like. So to be honest, at the moment, it’s on my mind quite often.”
On his mind. On all their minds.
