Fiona Murtagh’s leap from sweep to sculling has proven restorative. “For the first time in a long time it feels like the sky is the limit,” says the history-making Olympic medallist, whose decision to try the single followed a crushing Games and wholesale changes at Rowing Ireland. “I found my love for the sport again, but in a completely different way.”

“It came at an important time; I needed that change,” says the Galway native. “People ask me, ‘What if you’d found the single sooner?’ No. I found it at the time I needed to find it. I wasn’t ready before.”

One of four siblings, Murtagh started rowing fifteen years ago, following her twin brother Alan into the sport. He didn’t expect her to stick it, but she excelled. With consecutive titles at the Irish National Championships and a solid performance at the 2013 Junior World Champs in Lithuania, Murtagh caught the eye of American recruiters.

“I’d just turned 18 when I left for New York,” says Murtagh of her decision to accept a rowing scholarships to Fordham College in New York City, USA. “I’d never left home before. At the time I didn’t like Dublin because I thought it was too big of a city – what was I doing moving to New York?

“I was hemming and hawing, but Mam helped me make the decision. She said: ‘If you don’t like it, we can get you the next flight home’. So I thought if it doesn’t work out I’ll just come home and live my life knowing I tried it and I didn’t like it.

“But I tried it and I loved it! It changed my life. At that age you grow up quickly. It was the best thing for me.”

As Murtagh relives her earliest sporting crossroads, what becomes abundantly clear is the gratitude she has for her family’s support. She describes her parents’ non-pushy, confidence-giving outlook as: “Do what you want to do, the world is out there and it’s yours.”

Fast forward a decade and Murtagh is riding high off after another roll of the dice.

The Irishwoman has had a transformative season. After the Paris Olympics, where she and her longstanding teammate Aifric Keogh finished second in the B-final, far outside the women’s pairs podium they’d targeted, the two-time Olympian’s future was unclear.

“What am I doing here? It was a disappointing Games and I didn’t know where I stood with rowing. We had a complete management turnover, and our coaches suddenly left. It was going to be my first time as a high-performance athlete without them. It was a massive shock, a massive amount of uncertainty. I didn’t know where I’d fit into the organisation: do I go back to a centre full of scullers? What do I do?”

Rowing Ireland had chosen not to renew the contract of their high performance director, Antonio Maurogiovanni. Murtagh’s coach Giuseppe De Vita left too, and her pair’s partner, Aifric Keogh, along with a number of other sweep rowers, retired. Murtagh credits Maurogiovanni and De Vita for her first shot at international rowing. “I am the athlete I am today because of them.”

On-paper her reinvention as Ireland’s single sculler was an immediate hit. At her senior sculling debut she won a silver medal at the Europeans, and a month later another at the Lucerne world cup. Nine months prior the picture looked very different. “I started the year very vulnerable, very unconfident and very unsure.”

Given the choice between a session in the single or on the erg, Murtagh says until this season she would have always opted for the erg, no matter how beautiful the weather or flat the water.

“I used to actively avoid it. ‘Sculling? No that’s not me, that’s not my strength.’ I didn’t enjoy it and I didn’t think I’d be any good at it.” She’s come a long way. “I’ve learnt so much about myself. It’s a confidence thing for sure, sometimes borderline delusional. You know? It has to be.”

It took time and patience to get comfortable in her newfound discipline. “There’s another blade in my hands! What do I do with it?” she quips of her first sculling foray. “From November to January I was crawling up and down the river. Honestly, just crawling. Understanding what it feels like to be on your own, gaining confidence in any conditions, and mastering the balance, those things take time. But you have time in a post-Olympic year.”

This year, alongside learning to scull, Murtagh has worked for the financial services company JP Morgan. “It’s given me a different focus. It’s hard but it has benefitted me so much.” Fitting the mileage in around office hours means a lot of early starts and late finishes. In the winter she’d occasionally see her squadmates slip by in the early morning gloom as they boated, and she docked.

“I was training on my own and that took a lot of getting used to. I was so used to having Aifric in my ear and a coaching launch alongside me all the time – but this year there has been a lot of time when it’s just me. Two words are behind all this single sculling: Dominic Casey. It was his doing, entirely.”

The former Skibbereen head coach has been the driving force behind so much of Ireland’s success, including their first ever Olympic medal – at the Rio Olympics in the lightweight men’s double, and latterly has taken charge as the interim head coach. Murtagh is thankful that Casey could see that she had more to give.

“It’s been a mad year, a mad journey,” says Murtagh. Has it sunk in?

Apparently not. “‘The Irish Four’ or ‘The Irish Pair’. Now it’s my name, which is weird, I’m not used to that at all,” Murtagh says of race commentary. “I’m still getting used to the concept that I’m the single sculler. When I think of an Irish single sculler I think of Sanita [Puspure] because that’s who it’s been for so long.”

If her recent encounter at the Irish Rowing Championships is anything to go by it may be a minute before she catches up with her new status. She celebrated her 30^th birthday on the first day of competition. “The kids at my old boat club, Galway Rowing Club, gave me a card. They’re a lovely group, so wholesome and cute. On it they’d drawn a single sculler in a yellow boat. I looked at it and thought, ‘Why is Sanita on the front of my card?’”

Murtagh laughs: “I didn’t clock it! They think of me as the single sculler, which is wild. It’s mad that people think that I’m that person. I’ll always think of Sanita as the Irish sculler.”

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Photo Ireland’s former women’s single sculler Sanita Puspure racing in Plovdiv, Bulgaria.

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Photo Puspure on the podium in Plovdiv: the first of two world titles.

Drag

Has her two-time world and European champion predecessor offered any pearls of wisdom? “Sanita’s great; so supportive. She’s given me advice whenever I’ve asked for it. I know I’m quite rough around the edges: I have the engine and the engine is what I’m confident about.”

Her biggest technical hurdle? “I’m naturally quite front ended, but in the single you have to delay the drive. That’s been a huge part of my season, altering how I approach the drive. I’m constantly learning, but you can change anything over time.

“The single is so unforgiving and responsive. If you try something it will tell you straight away if that’s good or bad: you’ll know. It’s about having that understanding, and almost a relationship with the single, and being aware of what it is telling you.”

Technique isn’t the only change Murtagh has had to grasp. “The race is so long, especially in a headwind. You have to understand where that [physiological] line is. For the first half of this year I was flooring it until I absolutely died; like, today I can get this far, but tomorrow I’ll get 100 metres more.”

Murtagh admits she’s on a steep learning curve, as her mixed fortunes at nationals suggest. I tentatively raise the subject of her dip in Iniscarra lake, but before anyone can say the word ‘capsize’, a mirthful Murtagh launches into the story.

“I am learning all sides of the single – on the water and in the water. Conditions were so bad that in the warm-up the gusts would stop you dead: ‘We’re in for a treat here.’ It happened when I thought I was at my calmest, with around 400 meters left to go. I was in the lead: ‘Stay loose, stay calm, don’t do anything drastic.’ My blade hit the water; it shot out of my hand. I saw it as my face entered the water. ‘What has just happened?’

“It was the first time ever in my entire life that I flipped the single, so, of course, it had to be livestreamed, at the national championships, in a final I was winning!”

Murtagh’s weekend ended with a win in the eights. “A redemption arc.” With redemption in mind we circle back to the five-ringed circus.

“I wouldn’t still be here if I didn’t think Los Angeles was an actual possibility, but it is so far away I’m not really thinking about it,” says Murtagh, before discussing the curtailed race distance. “The mind games! 1500 metres will be interesting. It’s wild that there’s no [1500m] race before the Olympics, I’m surprised.”

For now Murtagh’s focus is on the upcoming Shanghai World Championships. Having proven she is as capable with two oars as she is with one, the possibilities of what comes next have significantly expanded. “Nothing’s tied down. I could be back in a pair, in a four, I have no idea what the mastermind Dominic Casey has going on inside his head.”

A veteran of the highs and lows that come with chasing Olympic glory, Murtagh medalled at her first five senior international regattas; making her senior debut at the 2020 Europeans where she won a bronze medal in the women’s four. A year later – as the world cautiously returned to competition mid-pandemic – her crew took silver at the 2021 Europeans, and won the Final Olympic Qualification Regatta to book their Tokyo ticket.

A rapid ascent amid Covid chaos. At their debut Games, Murtagh and her teammates made the final and beat the British four to secure an Olympic bronze medal: Ireland’s first ever Olympic medal in women’s rowing.

The Murtagh and Keogh pair made its debut at the 2023 World Champs. They finished fourth behind what would turn out to be the 2024 Olympic podium. They reinforced their status as medal contenders in the run up to the Games, securing two silvers and a bronze at the 2024 World Rowing Cup series.

“Our one bad week was the week of the Olympic Games,” laments Murtagh. “I felt so tired and not myself. I understand my body a lot better now, and what’s too much. It’s been a learning process: I think I needed to go through that to understand the single – if I’d gone into the single earlier I’d have fallen off a cliff.

“Harsh lessons and expensive lessons to have learned but they have definitely made me who I am today. It’s making sure that what happened last Olympiad,” she pauses, “I must carry those lessons with me. For better or for worse, I must not forget.”

“For it to end not in the way that we felt that we deserved – it took a long time to process. It’s sport: nothing is guaranteed,” says Murtagh, her voice thick with the painful memories and conflicting emotions of Paris.

Worth it? “Absolutely! The pairs project – I’m so proud of it. I still am. I loved showing up everyday. We had a purpose. We were thriving. We set ourselves a challenging target and for the majority of the time we met our goals.

“It was a different challenge from the Tokyo four. The pair is so tricky. It is not an easy boat to move well. The work that we’d done – it took a long time after Paris for me to realise it, but [I’m] super proud of what we achieved. Definitely. And to find that regardless of the result.

“Yes it’s about success and medals, everyone wants that, we’re high performance athletes, but if you can walk away from your career being like, I absolutely loved the 360 days in between those three or four races a year, you know there are a lot of days in between regattas. And I think the culture we set up here in Ireland amongst the team was such a gift.

“I’ve never hated stepping through the door [of the national training centre in Cork]. You don’t dread coming here. We get the work done but it’s the moments in between – the coffees, the chats, and the craic – that make it all worthwhile, regardless of the results. We love coming here. We’re a small team, but we’re like family.”

What of her actual family? Are they enjoying the performances of the new Irish single sculler? “My parents retired this year. They’re having a great time: jet setting around the world following their rowing daughter.”