Fifteen years before she became what she is – an Olympic finalist – Mona McSharry was just a young girl, five years old, who couldn’t swim to save her life. Literally.
er parents’ decision to enrol her in swim lessons emerged from a terrifying experience, McSharry falling into a lake while on holiday in Austria, her father having to jump to her rescue. Two years later, she began swimming in a competitive manner in the Community Games. A few years after that, she was winning national titles with Marlins Swim Club in Ballyshannon.
That was how it began and here, in Tokyo, is not so much where it finishes as where McSharry – so long touted as the next big thing in Irish swimming – finally arrives: one of the eight best athletes in the world in her specialist event, the 100m breaststroke.
There’s a reason it’s been 25 years since Ireland had an Olympic finalist in swimming (and even that was the now-tainted Michelle Smith): It’s a very, very hard thing to do. The sport has a foothold in across vast swathes of the world’s population and whenever that’s the case, the mass volume of talent that must be filtered down to those good enough to compete at an Olympics means the chances of Ireland getting just one into a final are tiny.
Swimmers of that calibre are not simply born or made, it’s both: they need to win the genetic lottery at birth and then require so much thereafter: supportive parents, expert coaching, and that’s before we get to the most important trait of all, the willingness to sacrifice so much of the average childhood and adolescence at the altar of sporting performance, unaware if it’ll ever produce a return. For most, it doesn’t.
Back in 2017, I sat down with McSharry shortly after she won the World Junior title in the 100m breaststroke, the 17-year-old taking me through the routine that got her to that point.
At the time she was preparing for her Leaving Cert at Coláiste Cholmcille, and the time demands due to swimming meant McSharry jettisoned her seventh subject, chemistry, aware that every hour of her day was too precious to spend on something that might not produce a tangible result.
Through those years her alarm would start bleating each morning at 4am, lie-ins not something she could entertain, not if McSharry wanted to get where she was going.
“You have to have that determination and drive,” she said. “If you don’t get out straight away, you’re done.”
They’d be out the door by 5am, one of her parents driving her the half hour it took to get to the pool in Ballyshannon, Co. Donegal, where she’d warm up for 30 minutes then spend the next two hours going back and forth along that 25-metre lane.
“It’s a lonely sport,” she said. “But you have to deal with it and grow stronger.”
She’d be back there every evening, too, and after dinner her nights were spent catching up on schoolwork, bedtime calling at no later than 10pm. Her training week finished by 10am on a Saturday and after that her weekends were her own, but even then concessions had to be made, McSharry signing up for a routine of relative asceticism compared to her peers.
“I wouldn’t be big into going out,” she said. “Maybe once or twice a year. If I do it’ll just tire me for the rest of the week.”
But all that investment has now found its reward, the outlier talent believing in her gifts enough to see them reach their full potential.
For the Irish public, she may already be a familiar face due to being part of the winning team on Ireland’s Fittest Family in 2019. But now she’s a global name, firmly on the radar among the sport’s best.
To get here has required tough decisions, and one of those came in 2019 when McSharry decided to accept a scholarship at the University of Tennessee, where coach Matt Kredich has carried on the years of good work done at home by Grace Meade.
McSharry enrolled in Tennessee in August last year and made a swift impact. She carved up the Irish record books over the last 12 months and is now the fastest female swimmer Ireland has ever had at 50m, 100m and 200m breaststroke, along with the 50m butterfly.
In her 100m breaststroke heat in Tokyo on Sunday night, she breezed into the semis with a time of 1:06.39, then came back out the following morning to finish fourth in her semi-final, her 1:06.59 seeing her through.
It capped a remarkable rise into the uppermost echelons of her sport, and seeing her achieve it and then speak about what it meant – a hint of a southern American twang now detectable in her accent – brought back memories of that conversation in 2017.
Back then we spoke about the last great young hope in Irish swimming, Gráinne Murphy, who won three gold medals at the 2009 European Juniors but who couldn’t make the same impact at senior level, something that occurred through no lack of desire but plenty of bad luck. McSharry didn’t know Murphy but she knew all about her story and was under no illusions about the breadth of the divide she still had to cross.
“People expect success but they don’t realise how big the jump is,” she said. “But I’m ready and excited to do it.”
And now she’s done it, and all those who played their part along the way should take immense pride in being part of it. Making the Olympic final signals her long-awaited arrival, but you get the feeling this story is only just beginning.