Inside the medal factory: A chat with Rowing Ireland's high

Jun 15, 2023

CHURNING OUT THE REPS: Irish rowers Aoife Casey (left) and Margaret Cremin in training at the National Rowing Centre. Pic: Eddie O'Hare

Antonio Maurogiovanni is chewing the fat over a plate of quarter-cut sandwiches and a coffee at the National Rowing Centre. The waters of Inniscara Lake stretch out calmly behind him and the mood is breezy and the chat brisk after his guided tour of one of Irish sport’s most productive medal factories.

All of this is unexpected.

Rowing Ireland’s high-performance director has been a whisper of a figure since taking over in August of 2017. Word had it that he harboured a distrust of the media going back to his days coaching in Italy and Australia. It’s less than a year since he chose to gag his athletes until their races were run at the European Championships in Munich.

But nothing is off the table here. An hour-long chat with a handful of journalists gets hijacked initially by two worthy but dry discussions. One is the shortfall of paid coaches at club level in Ireland. The other is the timing of the national championships in high summer which, he insists, is stymying the development of elite talent in this country.

“I know how to make a pizza so let’s make a pizza,” Maurogiovanni explains after a long back and forth. “Let’s have more pizzas. Why don’t we have more pizzas? Oh, national championships.”

Where, you wonder, has this guy been for the last six years?

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Muhammad Ali said the fight is won or lost far from the madding crowds, that it was decided “behind the lines, in the gym, and out there on the road, long before I dance under those lights”. The rowing centre, in a mazy country-lane drive off the N22 that links Cork and Macroom and flanked by Farran Forest Park, would have been Ali’s kind of place.

The Tokyo Review into Ireland’s last Olympic experience found the centre to be a functional, centralised facility that “drives constant learning”, but that the need for so much funding and staff attention dilutes the performance focus. It also ‘lacked comfort and felt isolated’. Maurogiovanni’s counter to that last point is that its location fosters togetherness.

The nearest coffee stop is the wonderfully-named Wunderkaffee, 4kms back down the road towards civilisation. There is a basic chill-out room on site, a boardroom that has been swallowed up for general use by athletes and staff, and a canteen area repurposed as the cardio hub and festooned with an omnipresent platoon of indoor rowing machines (ergs).

This is the nerve centre for what the man in charge calls Rowing Ireland’s army. The troops make it a hive of activity on this day as Olympic, World and European medallists walk from one room to the next, staff members adding to the hustle and bustle as one administrator’s dog sniffs around under tables and under feet.

One corridor is festooned with pictures and gold-plated captions of Ireland’s greatest. Another lists the roll call of medals won at World Championships down the years, starting with Sean Drea in 1975 and stopping at 2019. Seven more lines are still to be added from the 2022 version and the thought strikes that they’re fast running out of wall.

The attached kitchen lies mostly idle since the canteen area was requisitioned but the sense is of a building bursting at the seams with its downstairs gym and boat shed both expanded over the years to cater for a high-performance team approaching the 30-mark in terms of carded athletes.

That’s the most of any Irish Olympic programme.

No Olympic sport gets more high-performance funding from the public purse. Rowing Ireland will take in almost €4m in taxpayer’s money in this shortened three-year Olympic cycle. It’s carded athletes account for €757,000 in 2023 alone. If that sounds like big money then it merits some context.

Team GB had almost €28m of public money invested in its elite programme for the Tokyo cycle. They qualified 41 rowers to the Games and came back with two medals. Ireland, with only a fraction of that financial might, claimed a pair of podiums too but they finished above the neighbours in rowing’s medal table thanks to one of them being gold.

“If you want to win a medal then the investment is one million euro per year [per athlete],” Maurogiovanni says. “If you want two then that is two million.”

Olympic sport is an expensive business and the most cursory of strolls around the centre in Inniscarra confirms why rowing is at the very highest end.

Dozens of fiberglass boats sit on racks. More lie in storage in Spain and Italy, fenced off for races. One double costs between €18-20,000. An eight could be twice that and a boat will last only three or four years before they lose their stiffness from the wear and tear and the bumps and grinds from life on the road. A single oar is €4-600.

Timing, even in this, is everything. Most countries will take in new stock maybe four months out from an Olympics to try and shave a few milliseconds off race times. Think of Andrew Sheehan finishing second at the World U23 Championship this summer, 0.09 seconds ahead of Bulgaria’s Emil Naykov, and there is just no margin for error.

Spending money on high-performance in Ireland can feel like a game of whack-a-mole with new demands springing up just as the mallet finds an old one but there have been small, significant advances. Sports psychology, biomechanic and physio support is all provided on site now. A catering company delivers food three times weekly.

Ingenuity can play its own part. The team’s ‘heat chamber’ is a cheap, polyester garden 'greenhouse' in a corner of the boathouse warmed by portable heaters and, while foreign training camps are essential given the climate here, there is no escaping the long stretches spent on those ergs in the middle of a long Irish winter.

Aifric Keogh, a bronze medallist in the women’s four in Tokyo in 2021, spent the best part of this past 12 months recovering from injury while studying in Dublin but she turned the car south after Christmas to link in with her teammates for a week or two and found herself struck anew by the herculean workloads and the spirit it fostered.

“You came in in the mornings and it was still dark outside. You’re looking at the windows but it’s just pitch black so you just latch on to everyone else’s momentum. In 2019 Sanita [Puspure] was a double world champion, Phil [Doyle] and Ronan [Byrne] won their World Championship medal.

“I remember thinking before, ‘feck this, if they’re winning medals then why can’t we?’ You’re seeing it now in that there was only a men’s double in 2019 and now there’s a men’s pair, a four and maybe another boat. The team is just exploding. They all see what they can do and they all want in.”

Crews can spend 320 days of a given year in each other’s pockets, three or four hours in the morning and same again in the afternoon.

This is the life they choose, the contract they sign.

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“Football and volleyball are games,” Maurogiovanni declares. “Rowing is a discipline.”

You couldn’t find fault there. He’s 57 now and 46 years into his love affair with it. Born in Bari, Maurogiovanni represented Italy at the 1988 and 1992 Olympics in Seoul and Barcelona. Ireland became his fourth port of call as a coach when he succeeded Morten Espersen in the high-performance chair just over six years ago.

There may be fundamental fixes required even now but the elite system was already in a decent place when he started. Paul and Gary O’Donovan had claimed silver at the Rio Games the year before and his appointment came in the same week as an historic haul of one gold and two silvers at the European Championships in the Czech Republic.

Margaret Cremen and Aoife Casey, who will go in the women’s lightweight double sculls at the upcoming World seniors in Belgrade, had come second in the European Juniors a week before all that so there was talent bubbling underneath the surface as well. Ireland’s medal haul at the Worlds has crested 30 and it goes back decades.

The two medals secured at the Tokyo Olympics was actually one short of the three targeted and, while the team came up blank from the Europeans this summer for the first time since 2015, there is context in the leeway given to athletes to pursue college and career interests in the period after the delayed Games in Japan.

All those studies and side projects have more or less been shelved from here through to Paris and the squad announced for the upcoming Worlds, while still experimental in terms of some of the crew combinations, will be targeting A finals, the odd podium and up to four qualifying berths at the Olympics in 2024.

Large as the group is by Irish sporting standards, Maurogiovanni is conscious of the small pool in national terms. The British, Americans, Australians or Kiwis can afford to be blasé with their talent base. Ireland, like their rugby counterparts, invest far more in theirs once the gems have been uncovered. It’s the only way.

The man – and it is mostly men in Ireland’s high-performance director roles – at the top is key in all this. The Tokyo Review highlighted the “mixed standards” in terms of those occupying these crucial roles and some can lean into the autocratic territory. Maurogiovanni insists his door is always open and that athlete feedback is indispensable.

Crew selection, he says, is a collective experience. There are half-a-dozen coaches travelling with the team to the Worlds in Belgrade and the job of choosing who sits in what boat and alongside which teammate(s) is a nuanced affair that emerges only after a bunch of ingredients are mixed into the bowl.

Times and other crunched numbers make up the objective categories. The subjective can embrace everything from coachability, perceived ceilings and crew harmony. It’s no wonder the programme’s Italian overseer describes the coach’s job as an art rather than a science and, while empathy and communication are prized, there is no escaping the hard calls.

“You are only as strong as the weakest in the boat,” he says, “which is the same as life.” The centralised nature of Ireland’s programme is one that he regards as a major reason behind the team’s success but it is, in reality, a machine of many moving parts. There is no standing still. There can be no standing still. The very DNA of the group is always undergoing change.

The bronze claimed by the women’s four in Tokyo was a first Olympic medal for the female side of the programme and the likelihood that lightweight rowing will be lost to the Olympics come the LA Games in 2028 has seen a marked tilt in focus towards the heavyweight ranks.

Maurogiovanni saw this as one of his main duties when he pitched up here. That and a strategy that would ensure a stable base for what he still terms to be a “fragile” ecosystem. He believes they have that, a means to push on again post-Paris, but whether he travels that leg with them is another thing.

His family still lives in Australia and the thinking on his future will depend on a multitude of factors. Whatever the decision made in the next 12 months or so, he will leave at some point and Irish rowing and Irish rowers will keep ploughing through the waters. And he’s okay with that.

“It’s their programme. It’s our programme. It’s not my programme.”