Westport athlete competes for Ireland

HITTING HIS TARGETS?Ireland’s Con Doherty celebrates after winning the TriAthlone race earlier this year.?Pic: Ann Hennessy

For club and country


Westport athlete competes for Ireland

Feature
Daniel Carey

CON Doherty will represent Ireland at the European Cross-Country Championships in Belgrade next Sunday, December 8.
The Westport AC member finished fourth in the junior men’s race at the National Even Age Cross-Country Championships at Santry Demesne recently, and is part of a six-member team heading to Serbia this week.
It comes at the end of  a year in which the teenager has had plenty of highs – victories in the triAthlone and the Harlequin Duathlon in Castlebar, second in the World Cross Triathlon Championships, third at a European Cup triathlon event in Portugal. There have been lows, too; a flat tyre forced him to pull out of a European Cup event he was leading, while a crash left him with a broken scapula (shoulder), ruling him out of competing at the World Junior Championships.
“I was out on the bike and had a freak accident,” he told The Mayo News. “[My] foot unclipped out of the pedal and I went down. I didn’t find out until a couple of weeks after that it was broken.”
Because he ‘wasn’t able to do much’ after breaking his shoulder, the 18-year-old ‘did a bit more running’ and targeted a good cross-country season. He has now achieved his aim of making a ‘strong team’ for Serbia, which will be his last big event before he tackles the Leaving Certificate in June.
The Rice College, Westport student is considering studying physics at Leeds University, site of one of the UK’s three high-performance centres for triathletes. It’s a group that includes Olympic gold medallist Alastair Brownlee; his brother, Olympic bronze medallist Jonathan Brownlee, and ‘amazing’ coaches.
Doherty shot to national attention last year when finishing third at the World Championships in New Zealand. He had met the Brownlees a year before, and Jonathan Brownlee advised him to try and get to the event, telling him he was ‘an amazing athlete’. Doherty wasn’t sure initially, but having secured his place, he decided to go to Auckland, where he secured a bronze medal in October 2012.
“Just before that race, I was trying to get rid of the nerves,” he recalls. “I was up in the hotel room, and there was an interview with him [Jonathan Brownlee] on. He was … explaining the reasons not to be nervous. It was all falling into place. I’ve never been so relaxed before a race – that’s counting cross-country races in Mayo and Connacht; I was so laid-back, I was focused, and that was amazing.
“I still work on it. It’s hard to get it to the level it was that day, but I still can do it. It’s a bit of concentration – just relaxing and realising you’ve nothing to lose and you’ve everything to gain, no matter what position you’re in. It’s a valuable lesson.”
Doherty will be off to Edmonton next September for the 2014 World Championships. Before that, the Europeans take place in Austria, but as that comes shortly after the Leaving Cert, he’s targeting the race in Canada. He plans to ‘keep on top of’ triathlon in the New Year, but his main focus will be study for the first half of next year.
“At the moment, there’s not as much focus on the bike, because … in terms of talent that’s probably my best [event] and it takes a long time,” he explained. “Last year I was doing about 21 or 22 hours during the school week; at the moment, it’s about 16 hours … There’s not much time for downtime! At the moment, it’s just sleep, train, study – and eat!”
He stay ‘on top of’ his diet but stresses: “It’s about balance. There’s no point in going over the top, eating everything … But you’re burning a lot of calories as an athlete, so no matter what goes in, you burn it. Michael Phelps doesn’t have the healthiest diet in the world, but he just burns it ... It is important to have the balance, to be on top of it, and not going off and eating burgers every day and drinking soft drinks.”
Though he considers it his weakest event, swimming came first (from ‘since I was young’), followed by running. When he did his first triathlon – in Fingal, Co Dublin – he was ‘excited’ rather than nervous – “I just wanted to do it,” recalls Doherty, who’s proven himself to be a man for the big occasion. There was a lot of pressure on him in Athlone following his success in the Southern Hemisphere, but he had time to grab a flag from the crowd as he won comfortably.
“I like when there’s a big stage and a lot of people looking on,” he admits. “Athlone was ... almost as good as the Worlds, because even though it wasn’t near as [big] an event, just the fact that you had the home crowd and could fly the flag was pretty amazing. And to do what you wanted to do and it all coming together … that was just brilliant. It’s an amazing feeling.”