Fintan's going with the flow, on and off the water

KIERAN McCARTHY met up with Olympic champion Fintan McCarthy at the National Rowing Centre to chat about his ongoing journey in and out of the best lightweight men’s double in the world

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FOR a disciple of order, Fintan McCarthy has surprised himself by embracing the chaos of uncertainty.

He is the man who likes a plan, preferring to map out the way forward than walk into it blindfolded, but he has learned to adapt. To go with the flow on and off the water.

Paul O'Donovan and Fintan McCarthy in action in the men's lightweight double sculls.

The Saturday afternoon before the Rowing Ireland team jetted off to Italy for a camp ahead of the European Rowing Championships (Thursday, 25th to 28th), Fintan was back at the National Rowing Centre in Inniscarra for his second session of the day, still unsure what boat he would race in Slovenia.

Trials the previous day didn’t settle on who would sit in which boat. The absence of Paul O’Donovan for the Europeans – he was finishing college exams – has broken up the dream team of Fintan and Paul, albeit only temporarily one imagines. 

To a younger version of Fintan – and he’s only 26 now – the ‘up in the air’ state of flux would stress him out. Not as much now. He still prefers to know what’s happening and when, and plan accordingly, but as he developed into an Olympic, World and European champion in the Irish lightweight double too, he has grown outside the comfort of the boat too.

‘One hundred percent, the ideal situation for me would be to fast forward so I know who is in the boat this year,’ he explains, pointing out the importance of the international season ahead: it's the Olympic qualification year as the Paris Games in 2024 become the focus.

‘That is not how it’s been the last few years so I have got better at accepting that and working on what I can control. I would much prefer to be working towards a goal. Even now, most countries will be training in their boats and gearing up for the Olympic qualification regatta in September, but as long as I have been around it’s not how we have done it so I don’t really mind anymore. 

‘What we do can work and has worked.’

The results back this up: Fintan and Paul are on an incredible winning streak in the Irish lightweight men’s double. They are undefeated since World Rowing Cup II in 2019. They have now won 19 races in a row, and it has swelled Fintan’s medal collection at home in Foherlagh, a couple of miles outside Skibbereen town. 

A beam runs across Fintan’s ‘room in the roof’. For a long time, accreditations for various regattas hung from it. It was a bit bare, he laughs. There have been some heavyweight additions since – Olympic gold, two World gold and two European gold. It’s the chronology of his rowing career: from the outside looking in at the Irish men’s lightweight double to a man now firmly with his arse on a seat and hands gripped on the oars.

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‘It’s not like this everyday,’ Fintan smiles, sunglasses perched on his head as he looks out at the calm water at the National Rowing Centre, up towards the bridge that’s two kilometres away. 

For a start, it’s sunny. The sky above Inniscarra is a patchwork of clouds and blue; it's shorts and t-shirts weather. There’s a warmth to this early May sun he hasn’t felt since training camps abroad.

‘You wouldn’t mind a bit of wind if it’s not miserable outside,’ Fintan adds. On those not-so-sunny days, there is more shelter above the bridge, a four-kilometre stretch of water for rowers to hide from the elements. Not today, though. With weather like this, rowers can choose where they want to go: up past the bridge or down towards Inniscarra Dam. From above beyond the bridge down to the dam is over 13 kilometres without stopping.

The plan this afternoon is for a long 26-kilometre paddle with Hugh Moore, a 23-year-old rower from Coleraine who is part of the Irish men’s lightweight group (days later the line-up for the European Rowing Championships was confirmed: Fintan and Hugh will race together in the lightweight double). 

Hugh’s warming up in the gym, its doors opening up to Inniscarra Lake stretching out. There’s another familiar face in the gym: Fintan’s twin brother Jake, on the comeback trail after a persistent back injury (herniated disc in his lower back) in recent years that has sidelined him on land. The outlook is more encouraging now.

Jake, the older twin by minutes, is always a bundle of energy, but has endured a tough slog these last few years, his rowing career on ice. Fintan, seeing those struggles, appreciates even more how lucky he is to be fit and healthy to row every day. 

‘There was no finish line in sight for Jake for a long time, he didn’t know how long he would be in pain so credit to him to keep going and to be supportive of me. I don’t know if I could have been able to do what he did,’ Fintan says, before adding, ‘I always say Jake was much better than me so these last few years have been hard for him.’

Jake, Hugh Moore, and Ciarán Purdy, it’s more competition for Fintan and Paul, currently the men to dislodge from the boat, as the battle for seats in the best lightweight double hots up for this Olympic cycle.

‘For me I never really think of it as my seat,’ Fintan explains. 

‘I have come to terms with that if it all goes well, it could be, but what keeps me training is how much I wanted it back in the day is how much everyone else training now wants it too. 

‘I can’t do anything less than what I have been doing because someone else will come along and take that seat. That’s the way it goes: everyone wants to be in the boat.

‘It can get stressful, for me anyway. It is good to know that Paul and myself know what it takes to be that fast and to get that speed to win gold medals. Having that to fall back on is a great boost.’

There’s comfort in knowing what Fintan and Paul have achieved together has worked, and the platform to plunder those riches in waters across the globe begins at the National Rowing Centre. This is Fintan’s office, his place of work, a 12-minute drive from where he stays in Ballincollig. His metallic grey Ford Fiesta is like a yo-yo between home and the rowing centre. At least once a day. Often twice, like this Saturday. If he has a weights session he’ll tag it on to another session.

‘It’s not a normal existence,’ he admits. ‘It is hard for people to grasp that we row and train all day every day, and we eat and recover, and we do it all over again.

‘There are days you feel you’d love to sit at home and spend a few hours on the laptop, but we’re all surrounded by like-minded people,’ he adds, noting that a number of Irish rowers are based in Ballincollig, including the Skibbereen group of his brother Jake, Aoife Casey and Emily Hegarty.

‘The general consensus is what else you would be doing? I think that is there for when we are finished. You can only do what we are doing for a certain amount of time, while you’re fit and healthy, and there’s a life to be lived after rowing then,’ Fintan explains. He is keeping his mind busy outside the rowing bubble and is in the middle of a ‘manageable’ online Masters in Performance Coaching course with Setanta College. That’s due to finish up the month before the 2024 Olympics in Paris, and Fintan knows life is about to be consumed by what is likely to be the last Games where lightweight rowing will be involved. 

‘Lightweight rowing in the Olympics is up in the air right now, but that doesn’t affect what we are working towards,’ Fintan says, as his target is to defend his Olympic gold won alongside Paul O’Donovan in Tokyo in 2021. There’s a process to follow: keep his seat in the Irish lightweight double, qualify the boat at the World Rowing Championships in September, then hold on to his seat in the run-up to Paris.

It will take someone extraordinary to dislodge either the double’s current incumbents.

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Fintan and Paul’s approach in 2022 didn’t adhere to the conventional this-is-how-it-is-done ideology in rowing, but it has given the two Skibbereen rowers the confidence to know it worked. 

‘In rowing everything is done as it has always been done. Everyone trains together in the boats for months because that’s what you do. It did surprise a lot of people last year that we didn't row together too much,’ Fintan explains. 

‘We had a long year together in 2021, it being an Olympic year, but it’s not the be-all and end-all to be joined at the hip and living and breathing the double. We can both be improving and working on our own things and then come together and go fast.’

Fintan McCarthy celebrates with the bronze medal he won at the 2021 European Championships.

This is not how it’s usually done in rowing, but Fintan and Paul tested the water with a new approach last year – and it worked. With Paul consumed by his medical studies, himself and Fintan spent very little time together in the Irish lightweight double. Instead, they did their own thing, got the band back together for the big events, rocked up and rolled over their opponents. They won gold at the European Rowing Championships in August by three and a half seconds and repeated those heroics by another emphatic clearwater triumph at the Worlds the following month. The best got better by not training together. 

In the five weeks between the Europeans and the Worlds, they trained in different countries, before slipping back into their winning groove. 

‘We didn’t train together for those five weeks,’ Fintan points out.

‘After we won the Europeans Paul went back to college and I went to Spain on a training camp with the lightweight women. Myself and Paul didn't see each other until the Thursday before the World championships, which started on the Sunday.

‘The first race was a bit wonky but we have that base speed so it was about building on that during the week, getting through the rounds so by the time the final came around we were on it – and we were.’

For a man who prefers structure and organisation, this was anything but – and it’s another example of how Fintan has developed from the wide-eyed 22-year-old who won his seat in the Irish lightweight double in 2019, alongside the man generally accepted as the one of the best in the world, Paul, to the experienced rower now more comfortable in the unknown. 

Even the tweaks they make to their boat on the day of a race sit outside the accepted norms in rowing.

‘We are both quite detail-oriented, in different ways,’ Fintan explains.

‘Paul is very particular about the set-up, and that is something I have learned from him – the boat can feel different depending on the day. Usually a lot of people like to have their feet in a certain position – they practice like that and race like that. We’re different. We would be changing things on the way up to the startline, depending on how it feels on the day. 

‘I reckon the first few times people would have been buzzing to see what would happen, like “something is going wrong in the boat”. We would be tweaking our foot position or our gate height which is where our oars sit. This would be in the warm-up, or rowing to the start-line.

‘The day before a race at the Worlds last year we were changing something on the water, and the Czechs were rowing past us, whispering to each other, thinking there was something up, but this is just how we operate.’

The knowledge Fintan and Paul have built together has strengthened them even further. They were in each other’s pockets in 2021, and bossed the lightweight double. They spent most of 2022 apart and put even more distance between themselves and the chasing pack. They are both world class in the single scull, breathtakingly brilliant in the double. Together, the two men from the same parish of Aughadown sparkle, Fintan buoyed by his own journey last year when he put the head down, trained and rowed like a demon to improve on his 2021 version. He now has 2022 in the bank, knowing what he needs to do to get there again if he has to.

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The updated championship board that hangs in the hall of Skibbereen Rowing Club caught Fintan’s eye when he was training at home on the Ilen River a few weeks ago.

The updated championship board at Skibbereen Rowing Club.

This roll of honour carries the name of every Skibb rower who has won a national championship title for the club – and Fintan honed in on his own name, as winner of the lightweight men’s single and the senior single sculls in 2022, both firsts for him. Important milestones in his own journey. His priorities have shifted in recent years. On the way up the Irish Rowing Championships were the pinnacle. Still important now, whether Fintan can compete at the nationals depends on his international schedule; it highlights the journey he has been on that has led to the current version of Fintan, a rower on top of his game with the knowledge and experience to deal with whatever the circumstances are. 

‘This year I have taken a bit of pressure off myself in terms of hitting new speeds all the time, and I am trusting the process a bit more. I have enjoyed that quite a bit,’ he says. The hard winter graft is in the bank, it’s the start of the race season that will see the Europeans followed by World Cup II in Lucerne, and all leading to the 2023 World Rowing Championships that double up as the Olympic qualification regatta. 

‘We will definitely try and have the boat for the qualifiers nailed down for the World Cup in July. Subject to the results there we will see what happens. If all goes well in Lucerne I imagine that will be the boat going to the Worlds,’ he adds, and that’s the certainty he likes. Whatever the next few weeks have in store, Fintan can handle it. Uncertainty isn’t as daunting as it once was.