CYCLING LEGENDS KATIE-GEORGE Dunlevy and Eve McCrystal have won Ireland’s second medal of the 2024 Paralympic Games in Paris, claiming silver in the Women’s B 3000m Individual Pursuit.
In their final race as a duo, Dunlevy and McCrystal clocked 3:21:315 to finish second behind Britain and repeat the silver they won in the same event at the Tokyo Games in 2021.
This one was a far more unlikely feat, however: Dunlevy, 42, required surgery after breaking her collarbone in May and has been sick this week in Paris as recently as this morning.
McCrystal, 46, will retire from cycling as an Irish Paralympic great, while Dunlevy will now turn her attention to two events on the road, where she’ll partner with Linda Kelly.
“When you’re so close to gold, you’re slightly disappointed you didn’t get it but we’re absolutely ecstatic with silver,” said pilot McCrystal. “It goes beyond what we… we knew we could do it but we’re up against three British bikes. It lets a little bit of doubt creep in. Underneath it all we knew we could do it but you have to deliver it on the day.
“When the two of you are together, you constantly don’t want to let each other down, so you’re fighting every single day; that’s the fight for the last three years coming out, there, in a medal,” McCrystal added.
“We’ve always just trusted each other. Even with the collarbone, I was like, ‘She’ll be back.’ That doesn’t faze me at all. Collarbone, whatever…”
Dunlevy, who still has four pins and a plate in her collarbone, added: “I didn’t want to use that as an excuse, really. I was just focused on trying to recover from that, get training and get ready for this.
“I’ve had years of training behind me. It’s a matter of just getting the hours and the rehab in and I managed to. The collarbone is behind me now, even though it’s still sore at times and it reminds me that it’s still there.
When it came to this, we just had to fight, and we are both just fighters. We have trained damn hard to get here. We have put so much time into this to get here.
“We just have to really trust what we can do and the experience that we have, and just trust in ourselves and go for it. I always go, ‘Whatever will be, will be, as long as you just give your all.’
“My dad is crying his eyes out,” Dunlevy added. “It makes me very grateful to see my parents cry. I don’t see them cry very often.”
Britain’s Sophie Unwin and Jenny Holl, who earlier broke the world record as the fastest qualifiers, won this gold-medal showdown with just over two seconds to spare, but silver was a triumph for Dunlevy and McCrystal given their bumpy road to Paris.
Dunlevy and McCrystal poured it all out and led the race until the final three laps, by which point the incredible Unwin narrowed the gap and eventually overtook the Irish pair.
Britain’s world-record-breaking crew nailed their splits and timed their run to perfection. They trailed the Irish bike by 1.081 seconds after the first kilometre, and Dunlevy and McCrystal extended that advantage fractionally over the second.
But Unwin and Holl pressed hard over the last 1,000 metres to open up a lead of their own with a couple of laps remaining.
They finished in 3:19:149, just over two seconds clear of Dunlevy and McCrystal who had put so much into the first 2,500 metres in an effort to build an unassailable lead.
And Ireland’s silver medallists — the country’s second of these Games after swimmer Róisín Ní Ríain — stressed that their performance proved an old adage about age.
“From when my kids were born”, said McCrystal, “they have seen me training in the kitchen in turbo trainers. Every single day. For all of them to see all of our hard work, that resilience, that determination; for them to see that and a medal, I can’t put that into words. I am 46 years of age.”
“We’re in our 40s and we’re up against 20-year-olds,” interjected Dunlevy. “Age is a number.”
Earlier, Martin Gordon and pilot Eoin Mullen overcame serious adversity earlier in the week to repeat their feat from Tokyo and finished fifth in the the final of the men’s B 1000m Time Trial.
Gordon and Mullen had earlier come home in a national-record 1:01.158 to finish as the fifth-fastest qualifiers, with six bikes making it through to the showpiece.
The Irish bike was fractionally slower in the final, recording a time of 1:01.520 to claim fifth.
“To back up the national record this morning — two and a half hours later, to go three tenths of a second slower, it’s backed up, it’s a good result and it shows a massive effort on our part,” said Gordon, who went on to confirm that he and Mullen had suffered a “bad crash” on Monday and felt grateful that they were in shape to compete at all.
“We didn’t know if we’d be here at all today,” Gordon said. “Our coaches, physios, doctors and mechanics got us on the start line today. Where we were on Monday, I would have taken your hand off to do what we just did today.
“It was an unfortunate accident. One of the other nations’ tandems had a blowout in front of us. They came down, left us with nowhere to go. It was just one of those freak accidents on an open track. We had to go over the top of them. We came down.”
Pilot Mullen added that he’d suffered a shoulder injury during the incident, which the Irish team tested out in a trial run as recently as Thursday.
“It held up, it wasn’t perfect but it was enough to get us through,” Mullen said.
“We can make excuses but at the end of the day, we don’t really need to.”
Written by Gavan Casey and originally published on The 42 whose award-winning team produces original content that you won’t find anywhere else: on GAA, League of Ireland, women’s sport and boxing, as well as our game-changing rugby coverage, all with an Irish eye. Subscribe here.
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