THERE will not be too many Olympic medallists who will have the lead-in to a medal that Daire Lynch has.
Today, he and Philip Doyle took bronze in the Men’s Double Sculls.
It might have been silver had the latter’s neck not seized up in the closing stages causing his grip on the oar to loosen.
Doyle’s tale is a familiar one of sporting redemption.
He travelled to the last Olympics as a silver medallist at the World Championships but he and Ronan Byrne finished last in the semi-final in Tokyo.
Afterwards, the Banbridge doctor spoke movingly about thinking of his late father Eamonn, to whom he had brought in his first rowing medal in a hospice in Newry in 2015.
His mother Una was in the crowd to witness what might be his last.
Doyle is 31, Lynch five years his junior.
Lynch’s path to this point was amusingly outlined in a LinkedIn post by Sam Baum, formerly Yale’s assistant rowing coach.
He recalled barely being able to understand the Tipperary man in his first phone call but picked up enough to learn that he worked at McDonald’s and trained on his own.
On their second, Baum expressed surprise at how he had gotten so fast so quickly.
Lynch informed him that he had messaged as many top rowers as he could on Instagram to ask for advice.
The recruiter advised Lynch that his ‘limp fish’ handshake would not go down well with head coach Steve Gladstone who was leaning towards someone else to fill the one available spot on their programme.
His training in the back of a car to provide a firm greeting was arguably as important as any on the water before or since.
After five years in the Ivy League college, Lynch had entered the real world, working away in the States before deciding to give the Olympics a lash.
With a medal hanging from his neck, Lynch shrugged: “Sure that’s why I came back.
“I was over there working, and I said, ‘Surely there’s more to life than this’.
“There was a gym in the building I was living in over there, and I started training on the rowing machine, morning and evening.
“A lot of my friends went into the bank and consulting and stuff in New York, you’d be working nine o’clock until one o’clock at night.
“If I had one of those jobs I probably wouldn’t be here.
“I was lucky I was with a start-up, NewtonX, market research, a bit more relaxed hours, nine to seven, so I’d train before and after.
“If I didn’t have that kind of job I definitely wouldn’t even have thought of coming back.
“I was getting fit again and I thought I may as well have a go again, it’s only a year and a half, and see what happens.
“Who would’ve known a year and a half ago that we’d be getting a bronze medal at the Olympics?”
NICK OF TIME
Lynch’s timing could not have been better for Doyle.
He recalled: “I kind of had a campaign in the single on my mind almost.
“And then Daire showed up from New York and we did a trial with some of the young guys coming off the Under-23 team, and it was close but Daire won out.
“He was coming back from New York and he wasn’t at his fittest, but then he just got fitter and faster, and nobody else really had a chance to step into the boat.”
Doyle is asked whether a medal might have been possible on his own.
Doyle said: “Jesus, I don’t know. I raced a single once and I was in a C final.
“The single is a different beast.
“You have to have a lot more physiology whereas with us it’s about synchronising and working together, and making the most out of each other as a pairing.
“We’re ying and yang personalities but we’ve found the best way to match together and work off each other’s strengths.
“The things that I lack, he brings and the things that he lacks, I bring.
“I don’t know what they are, but it seems to work and we’ve had a great partnership.”
The chemistry worked again at the Vaires-Sur-Maine Nautical Stadium.
Spain and Romania set the early pace with Ireland third.
They had dropped to fifth by the 500m mark but never looked like dropping out of contention.
Spain fell away but Romania surprisingly maintained their position at the top, only briefly losing it to gold medal favourites Holland around the 1500m mark.
It became clear that those two crews would decide first place between them but there was an equally intriguing battle emerging for bronze.
The USA were in third at both the halfway and three-quarters mark but they never managed to put any sort of distance between them and Doyle and Lynch.
And the Irish boat slowly but steadily reined them in over the last 500m and ultimately had almost two seconds to spare over them, to match their third place in last year’s World Championships.
POST-GAME ANALYIS
Immediately afterwards, Doyle apologised for a mistake which, he said, had cost them a chance of winning silver. Later on, he elaborated.
Doyle said: “We had to go earlier than we thought so we had to put more in.
“There was actually a bit of a wash the whole way down and a bit more of a headwind than we thought.
“So we were being pushed a little bit over and this neck thing has been at me all year, really, and it just sort of then started seizing up.
“We were on the red line and then I kind of just lost the handle a little bit in one of the strokes and I looked and I was like, ‘please, not too much left. Where are you going here?’
“I looked up and I was like, oh the Americans are far enough back.
“We were moving on the Dutch but look, what can you do?
“You push yourself to the line. Sometimes you fall over it but me managed to rectify to rectify it was more like a glitch.
“You try and smooth it out and then relax a bit more, because if the body gets tense, then you’ll overwork it.
“You need rely on the legs and try and let the arms loose.
“So, I’m glad I put myself into the position where I had to work hard because then I would have come in feeling good and we would have finished fourth.”
That informed the muted celebrations at the end.
Doyle said: “I nearly dropped the flipping oar with 50 metres to go, so I think a little bit maybe was just relief.
“It was just a release almost, it was kind of a wave of positive and negative and relief and disappointment.
“You can stand up and jump around, but if you’re doing that, you probably could have done more during the race.
“After the World Championships final, I fainted.”
Elsewhere, the women’s four of Emily Hegarty, Eimear Lambe, Natalie Long and Imogen Magner won their B final with Alison Bergin and Zoe Hyde coming fourth in theirs.