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MONA MCSHARRY WEPT with delight as she became Ireland’s first medalist at the Paris Olympics, and the first Irish swimmer to medal since 1996.
McSharry won bronze in the women’s 100m breaststroke at the La Defense Arena, finishing just 0.01 seconds clear of fourth place.
“I started crying on the podium and I haven’t fully stopped yet”, said McSharry. “It’s just the pinnacle of sport to have all your hard work pay off in something like this, at this moment.
“There’s been a huge progression, it’s definitely down to a lot of hard work and dedication to trying to be the best I can be, and keep pushing to be better. All athletes will relate with the fact that once you do something, you’re straight on to wanting to do the next best thing.”
McSharry’s goggles filled with water as she dived into the pool, but she did not allow it to encumber her on her way to history. “Sure look”, she said, “no race is perfect.”
While yesterday she exuded calm, McSharry admitted to feeling nervy ahead of the final.
“I was definitely a little bit more nervous. I rushed through my prep tonight so I had a little more time in the prep area, sitting and waiting, thinking, ‘Oh my God I don’t want to sit here now’. I felt myself getting nervous. But that’s when you have a great group of people around you to chat to and distract you.”
The blocks of the pool light up with a corresponding number of red dots for those who finish first, second, and third, and this was how McSharry realised she had fended off the challenge of Italy’s Benedetta Pilato in fourth place.
“The Chinese swimmer beside me got second, but then I saw the three dots I was over the moon. I turned to see my time, but times don’t matter in a final. It’s about hands on the wall.”
Following that initial rush of glory, McSharry had to steady herself to make sure she soaked it all in.
“I got a little flustered after I won it, and I had to calm myself down. ‘You need to take in the moment here. We need to really enjoy this. I don’t think I’ve ever cried for a medal before. That shows how big a deal it is.”
And as she stood on the podium, she could not ignore the tougher moments, those which she came through for her greatest moment of all. McSharry flirted with quitting the sport in 2022, but righted herself the following year.
“Before I did it, I would have said, ‘Can I really do that?’ And now I have it I’m like, ‘What’s next?’
“I had a flashback to all the hard work I’ve been going through this year, the tougher moments and the moments where I thought, ‘I don’t know if I can do this.’
“That was really nice. And then scanning the crowd and watching the flag go up. It’s just a bunch of emotions and just unbelievable energy.”
It was a moment born nine years earlier.
“I have been telling myself I am going for a medal all year, and this was in the plan when I sat down with my coach in 2015. We said that 2020 would be the feeler Olympics and 2024 would be where we get stuff done. It’s been in the works for a while, there have been doubts in there, I have always had the expectation I could do it.”
There is little time for celebration, however, as McSharry races again in the 200m breaststroke on Wednesday morning.
“We are not done yet! Try and calm down tonight, and I might get a chocolate muffin, that’s my sweet delight.”
What hangs from her neck is much sweeter.
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Yeah, for sure lol
@Brian Pocock: I just knew the first comment would be from a klown who doesnt understand the issue.
@Ted Daly: do tell
@damien leen: There’s this thing called ‘science’ Damien..look up the definition of the word when ya get a chance.. if you’re struggling after that, I can’t really help you.. thats all there is to tell really.
Climate change is a crock of shi……
@Thomas Meaney: tell that to vast swathes of the middle east that are virtually unlivable. Ya numpt-y
@Ted Daly: don’t live there, don’t want to live there, have no intention of going there, don’t care…
Well it didn’t reach Carrick On Shannon
definitively not here
That would be an ecumenical matter
The Journal trolling the trolls.
Would someone explain to me, did they take thermometer readings from every official weather station in the whole world, including at the north and south poles and come up with the average temperature on that day ?
@Sean Walsh: They sure as hell did not do that, we’ve virtually no data for majority of ocean, one official measuring station in arctic circle and co2 is measured from one spot on earth for global average atmospheric concentration (Hawaii). the Data for the period pre 1940s comes from US and some European data, nothing exists for rest of the world until the modern era but hey ‘trust the science’
As Bob Dylan once sang. meantime life outside goes on all around you.
@Brendan O’Brien: (That was meant for Gerald K.)
All scientific method modelling is based on clockwork solar system modelling. At the centre of that modelling is a framework (RA/Dec) in which experimental theorists insist that the planet does not turn once every 24 hours and do not appreciate the references where the planet turns a thousand times in a thousand 24-hour days.
Life, your life, is built on observation that has been going on long before life on Earth began with sunrise, noon, and sunset every 24 hours. It is the most immediate and precious experience of the Earth’s motions.
Then, we have mathematical modellers going back to the Royal Society Isaac.
” It is a fact that, owing to the difference between solar and sidereal time, the Earth rotates upon its axis once more often than there are [24 hour] days in the year” NASA
Yawn
Many commenters here didn’t experience the Thatcher years when the modelling of the University of EA and other institutions was funded as a means to an end. Some say it was to break the unions and coal miners and then snowballed.
“It is mainly by unlocking nature’s most basic secrets, whether it be about the structure of matter and the fundamental forces or about the nature of life itself, that we have been able to build the modern world. This is a world which is able to sustain far more people with a decent standard of life than Malthus and even thinkers of a few decades ago would have believed possible” Thatcher.
https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/107346
Surely someone here knows what the conviction of Malthus is and its application by Trevelyan in famine Ireland?
@Gerald Kelleher Spencer first raised the notion of implementing a famine in Ireland in the 16th century, a couple of hundred years before Malthus. As for Trevelyan, he didn’t cause the famine and he was a fanatical adherent of the Liberal policy of laissez faire, which wasn’t necessarily an anti-irish policy, even if it did result in many deaths.
There is nothing worse than an Irish Royal Society redneck, while Thatcher can be excused and her perspectives on Ireland understood in that way.
“An Attila, or a Zingis Khan and the chiefs around them might fight for glory, the fame of extensive conquests, but the actual cause that set in motion the great tide of northern emigration, and that continued to propel it till it rolled at different periods against China, Persia, Italy, and even Egypt was a scarcity of food, a population extended beyond the means of supporting it.” Thomas Malthus
The needs of the invaders outweigh the needs of the invasion between famine Ireland and industrial England. Natural selection weaponised Malthus after the famine as the biological faults of the invaded and natural selection.
@Gerald Kelleher: do you set your shower temperature to 32.6°C or 34.3°C?
@Gerald Kelleher: Yeah, right. Take those blinkers off.
@Gerald Kelleher: and Malthus died years before the famine.
Commenters can’t stomach the fact that Origin of Species originated from conditions between neighbouring famine Ireland and industrial England and not the fairytale of the neighbouring Galapagos.
“Something brought to my recollection Malthus’s “Principles of Population,”. I thought of his exposition of “the positive checks to increase”–disease, accidents, war, and famine, which keep the population of savage races to so much lower an average than that of civilized peoples… The more I thought over it, the more I became convinced that I had, at length, found the long-sought-for law of nature that solved the problem of the Origin of Species.” Wallace
Travelyan was a student of Malthus and it survived into the Thatcher years when mathematical modelling of climate began.
@Gerald Kelleher: no one cares about your ramblings,you’ve a laughing stock made of yourself on here
@Jb Walshe: have you noticed how Gerald thrives on our answers, and answers more nonsense every time?
And how he was strangely silent on Friday during the big IT blackout?
Who was among Darwin’s less favoured ‘races’?
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Descent_of_Man_(Darwin)/Chapter_V
It is an opportunity to remove the prejudice conviction that many of you learned in school as natural selection without the intents and purposes as it existed in the Victorian era.
The muck of climate change, action, justice, and neutrality comes from the same community, whereas reasonable people preface climate with maritime, polar, tropical, and so on.
Many but not all commenters here remind me of those sterile (woke) people on the radio who can’t reason for themselves.
@Jerry LeFrog: I don’t know how he slipped through Darwin’s net…kinda disproves the theory
@Jb Walshe: Leave the man alone, we are all entitled to our opinions whether we agree with each other or not.
Given an opportunity to deal with a dangerous prejudice conviction that is natural selection, with its roots in famine Ireland and Malthus, silence reflects a chronic condition.
“But the mental requirements of the lowest savages, such as the Australians are very little above those of many animals. The higher faculties and those of pure intellect and refined emotion are useless to them, are rarely, if ever, manifested, and have no relation to their wants, desires, or well-being. How, then, was an organ developed so far beyond the needs of its possessor? Natural selection could only have endowed the savage with a brain a little superior to that of an ape, whereas he actually possesses one but very little inferior to that of the average members of our learned societies” Wallace
@Gerald Kelleher: You habitually connect things that in fact have no connection other than your distaste for them. Doing so does not prove anything except your lack of logic.
@Maire Hicks: enjoy the ramblings Marie
@Br: I have seen how intransigent the Royal Society community can be, like Brexiteers who dig a hole for themselves and everyone else and can’t find a way out of their indulgences.
https://people.wku.edu/charles.smith/wallace/zGreg1868.pdf
There is no difference between natural selection and eugenics because eugenics is natural selection where the Irish, with their narrower brain, play a starring role as a less favoured ‘race’.
A generation of Irish bought into the Royal Society subculture, and I often hear them as radio presenters in the morning. No doubt, as these people get older, they will begin to realise that what they thought as entering was a bright and shiny academic community in research was no better or worse than the denomination Church version of spirituality.
@Jerry LeFrog: I’m with you.
(Gerald is a piece of computer software, a bot, trolling the journal. The system crashed during the IT blackout, and was unable to run ‘Gerald’.)
I am Irish, but sometimes, I feel that Kingsley was right when it comes to the Irish being more comfortable under Royal Society rules than dealing with prejudice as it surfaced as ‘races’.
“But I am haunted by the human chimpanzees I saw along that hundred miles of horrible country. I don’t believe they are our fault. I believe that they are happier, better, more comfortably fed and lodged under our rule than they ever were. But to see white chimpanzees is dreadful; if they were black, one would not feel it so much, but their skins, except where tanned by exposure, are as white as ours.” Kingsley in Ireland
https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/letter/DCP-LETT-3439.xml
They say a chimp died in Dublin zoo but what about the human chimps here who go berserk when shown academic prejudice.
@Gerald Kelleher: I think your ranting is raising global temperature.
@John:
The most disruptive juvenile delinquent from the roughest estate in England has more integrity and dignity for his culture than the President of Ireland or someone of similar status has for the Irish culture.
The Irish, as a less favoured ‘race’ in the estimation of a section of English academic and political society, acted as a template for natural selection. Given the major opportunity to serve the world with the productive notion of diverse cultures, many commenters prefer to retain prejudice as favoured and less favoured ‘races’.
With dignity comes a lack of fear; with silence on this matter comes cowardice. The Royal Society rednecks who can’t discuss the topics don’t bother me, but the Royal Society Journal of rednecks pumping out empirical junk is a different matter.
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