O'Sullivan will not be the only Irish competitor going for gold on Sunday, however, following a brilliant finish from Ireland's men's coxless fours in their rowing semi-final on Lake Lanier yesterday.

The four - stroked by Tony O'Connor with Neville Maxwell, Sam Lynch and Derek Holland behind - came from behind to clinch the third qualifying place from their semi-final. The manner of their finish suggested that they could be likely contenders for a medal in tomorrow's final.

The Irish Times,

Saturday July 27, 1996

It was a Monday afternoon and they were driving on the I-85 to Atlanta. Twenty-four hours had passed since the medals had been presented and they had quit the lakeshore but Sam Lynch had not left the boat. The race was playing on a loop in his head and he was feeling every stroke.

The thrill of those first 500m when - heart pounding and buzzed with adrenaline - they had thrown caution to the wind and raced into the lead. The pain starting to bite at 1,000m - half-way - when the Danish and Canadian crews drew alongside. Glory still there for them, still beckoning with 500m to race: 'We're going to get a medal here!'

400m.

The American's starting to close.

300m.

The blood turning to honey in his veins.

200m

The crowd getting louder; the gap getting narrower.

100m

The absolute despair of those final strokes.

Gold: Denmark

Silver: Canada

Bronze: United States

They had delivered the best Irish rowing performance at an Olympics for 20 years but, like Sean Drea at Montreal in '76, there are no cigars for finishing fourth. And as Lynch glanced out the window at the rolling Georgia countryside, the disappointment consumed him.

Michelle Smith had enjoyed a slightly more successful week. Her extraordinary performances in the pool - three gold medals and a bronze - had earned her an audience with Bill Clinton and transformed her overnight from a Cinderella of Irish sport to undisputed Queen.

Pat Hickey, the OCI president, was one of many new suitors and was escorting the swimmer around the Team Ireland quarters when the rowers arrived from Lake Lanier. It was their first time in the athletes' village - they'd spent the week in a house near the lake - and Sam remembers feeling pleased, and a little surprised, that she knew they had finished fourth.

He also felt as if a pistol had just been pointed at his head. He had seen nothing of the Games and felt completely out of touch. How was he supposed to respond? But he had to respond. And he did respond. And 20 years later, he can still see Hickey wincing and shaking his head

"Thanks Michelle. How did you get on yourself?"

1

Eight hundred miles to the north, as Lynch was shaking hands with Ireland's new superstar, Sinead Jennings was sitting at a lifeguard station in Wildwood, New Jersey, wearing a fluorescent orange bathing suit. It didn't garner as much attention as the one made famous by Pamela Anderson but the role was the same.

"It was a total Baywatch job," she smiles. "There were 70 lifeguards on the beach and we were seven girls. I went out with my best friend from college and we had the best time ever."

Jennings was 20 years old that summer and had competed in a couple of triathlons but was too busy partying to bother about Atlanta or what was happening at the Olympics. But mighty oaks from little acorns grow and it was here in this unlikeliest of places - a sunny beach in New Jersey - that the obsession was born.

"There were so many nice looking lifeguards," she says, "and they all had one thing in common - most of them rowed in college. So we decided we were going to start rowing when we went back to get a man."

There wasn't much rowing at Sunderland University but a year later, after completing a degree in pharmacy, Jennings moved to Edinburgh for pre-reg training and joined the St Andrews Rowing Club. Those first weeks in the boat - a four - were a brutal assault on the senses: blistered hands, aching back, worn legs, sore arms. But she kept coming back.

She won a Scottish Novice Championships, switched to a double with Allison Harrison and began working with an acclaimed coach, Hamish Burrell, in 1999.

The first session was memorable: "What do you want to do?" he asked.

"I'd like to win a Novice championships?"

"That's it!"

"I might enter the Senior championships as well."

"That's it!"

"Well, maybe I could go to a World Cup?"

"That's it!"

She looked at him blankly.

"What about a medal?"

"A medal?"

"What about the Olympics?"

"The Olympics!"

"You don't want to win a medal at the Olympics?" he asked.

A year later, in May 2000, she was selected to compete for Scotland in the lightweight single sculls at the Duisburg International regatta. Her parents, Michael and Theresa, had made the trip from Letterkenny and watched in delight as she scorched the final. But there was a sting in the tail.

"It was really weird," she says. "I remember looking at the board and it said Sinead Jennings GBR. My mum was in shock. 'Oh my God!' she said. 'If you win they're going to play God Save the Queen!' But luckily they only played a fanfare. I'm not sure I'd have ever lived it down."

The win had also tripped some alarms in Ireland. Wasn't this Jennings girl from Donegal? Shouldn't she be racing for us and not them? Some frantic calls were made and she was invited to compete for Ireland, two months later in Munich. The team was in situ when her late-night flight touched down from Edinburgh. Sam Lynch was tasked to wait up with a key.

It was late and he was irritated: 'Who is this girl? Is she Scottish? Has someone given her a passport?' The race was playing on his mind and he wanted to go to bed but eventually she arrived.

"I'm Sam," he announced gruffly.

"I'm Sinead," she replied.

"Here's your key. See you in the morning."

"Oh . . . right."

It wasn't a great start.

2

Sam didn't take long to wipe Atlanta from his mind. It was true they had been unlucky and should have won a medal, but they had also raced badly and left their brains on the bank. That wasn't his fault. He was six years younger than Tony O'Connor, and five younger than Neville Maxwell, the two Irish stars. He was a year younger than Derek Holland and had not made the plan. And it was this, more than anything, which sustained him in the months that followed.

"I'm 20 years old," he thought. "There will be plenty more chances."

That he was already an Olympian was remarkable. The eldest son of Tom and Geraldine Lynch, he had shown no aptitude for hurling or football at Ard Scoil Ris in Limerick and only a modest talent for racing when a classmate introduced him to St Michael's Rowing Club.

He was small and skinny as a boy, and technically not that gifted, but he had guts to burn and made great progress as a junior. In January 1996, when he was invited to join a development squad of 16 rowers being groomed for the Atlanta Games, few would have predicted he'd have made the final cut. But eight months later he was a member of a fab four already being tipped for greatness in Sydney.

But the following season, it fell apart. Their brilliant coach, Thor Nilsen, had returned to his home in Sweden and they were constantly bickering. "We just got bogged down in details," he says. "We never came off the water and said 'That was a good session.' It was always that was a good session BUT! Negativity pervaded everything."

In March 1998, his involvement with the crew ended when he was knocked off his bike cycling to a lecture at UCD and tore his shoulder muscles. The doctors advised him to quit for the season but he soldiered alone for a couple of months and decided to switch to a single.

The transition from sweep rower (two hands on one oar) to sculler (one hand on each oar) wasn't easy but the mentality of going it alone suited him. He started training with Niall O'Toole, the 1991 World Champion, and a year later, in August '99, he finished fourth at the World Championships in Ontario

The following summer, as he sat stewing and waiting for Jennings in Munich, he had no qualms at all that he would not be travelling with Maxwell and O'Connor to Sydney for the Olympics. His target for the summer was the World Championships in Zagreb where he was just pipped for gold (point seven of a second) by the Czech, Michal Vabrousek. But the real surprise was when Jennings raced to bronze in the women's event.

"We got quite friendly over the course of that summer and the year that followed," Lynch says. "You don't have a partner in the singles - the fours walk around together and the doubles walk around together - but we would weigh-in at the same time and do a lot of the same things. And I liked to talk before a race, and Sinead liked to listen, so it suited us well."

A year later, in August 2001, they won two gold medals at the World Championships in Lucerne. "We met on the podium," Lynch says. "She was coming off and I was going on and after, as we were walking down the path along the water, everyone was doing a double take because there was an Irish guy and an Irish girl with a gold medal around their necks. It was like: 'What boat was that?'"

The Athens Olympics were on the horizon. There were no lightweight single sculls on the programme but there was a lightweight double. Sam was teaming up with a world champion, Gearoid Towey: Sinead would try to qualify with the less experienced, Heather Boyle. It promised to be the best two years of their lives.

But things were getting complicated.

3

She finds a parking space for her Volkswagen Polo on Strathern Road and leads the way into a hallway with an old concrete staircase to an apartment on the first floor. She searches for her key and you note the names on the door. "There are three conditions if you want to stay in this flat," she smiles. You've got to be a pharmacist, a rower, or Irish."

Mick Walsh, the pharmacist, is a native of Fermoy. Steve Pillar works for Deutsche Bank but rows at a local club. And Tony O'Connor from Dublin is not just a rower, he's a World Champion rower.

"I'm just going to take a quick shower," she announces, depositing you in the kitchen. You place a notebook on the table, glance around the room and are drawn to a portrait on the mantelpiece of a woman, rowing across the lake. The sculler is clad in an Irish racing suit and her lean but muscular features bear a striking resemblance to Sinead's but the portrait is unfinished, she has yet to be given a face.

"That's me," Jennings confirms when she returns, drying her hair. "Tony is painting it. He's struggling a bit with my face." Tony O'Connor is her fiancé and it is easy to understand his plight. Spend an afternoon with Jennings at home and you'd offer her the leading role in Amelie. But follow her to the boathouse and the transformation is startling . . .

Sunday Independent,

January 2002

4

That first night in Munich.

"Hi, I'm Sam."

"Hi, I'm Sinead."

She knew who he was. She had noticed him in Duisburg a couple of months before. "I liked Sam as soon as I met him," she says. "I had only been rowing for two years and had only started rowing to find a man and I saw Sam and told my friends: 'Oh my God!' But he was going out with somebody else at the time, and then myself and Tony got together."

Their marriage was set for September 2003. O'Connor's brilliant career - 21 National titles, five World Championship medals and that cruel fourth place finish in Atlanta - had drawn to a close and he was coaching Towey and Lynch for Athens. Gearoid was to be best man. Sam would be a groomsman.

It was typical of rowers and rowing - just one big, happy family - but Sinead was having second thoughts and the wedding was cancelled.

"Thankfully, I did not have a hand in them breaking up, but it was messy," Lynch says. "I was good friends with Tony, and had stopped looking at Sinead in a romantic way, but the minute she became available it was blindly obvious to me that there was only one person I wanted to be with. But it was not the right time.

"It was an Olympic season. Tony was coaching the team. And it made the first couple of years of our relationship quite difficult, because it didn't start like it should have started. It was all surreptitious and hiding."

The countdown to Athens was turbulent.

At the final qualifier in Lucerne, Jennings and Boyle faded in the last 100m and were denied a ticket to the Olympics by one tenth of a second. Lynch and Towey had made it, and were fancied to medal but were struggling to make the weight.

The maximum weight of a lightweight rower was 72.5 kilos. There was a permissible average of 70 kilos allowed, so if Towey weighed-in at 69 kilos, Lynch would have to make 71 - not easy with a 6ft 3 inch frame.

"I was out with friends in Edinburgh the night before the heat and remember calling him," Jennings says. "He said, 'What are you doing?' I said 'I'm just having desert.' And he went ballistic: 'I'm sitting here starving and you're talking about desert!"

"Athens nearly levelled me," Lynch says. "I had never worked so hard for anything in my life. We had beaten the Poles (the gold medalists) twice that year but the weight just killed us. I didn't enjoy it at all. It taints my whole perception of my career. I look back on my career as a failure based on that - I shouldn't but I can't get past it.

"I went home, and had visions of going back into a single but I was training one day in October and just stopped. I remember Sinead passed me: 'What are you doing?' she said. But I just sat there, thinking, in the middle of the river: 'No, this isn't for me.' I stopped at Islandbridge and put the boat on the rack and that was it. I never raced again."

5

"So, this story?"

"Yeah."

"You said it was about Rio?"

"Yeah."

"You said it was about the Olympics?"

"Yeah."

"You said it was about a woman?"

"Yeah."

"Sinead Jennings?"

"Yeah."

"A 39-year-old mother of three?"

"Yeah."

"But you're not writing about her, you're writing about him?

"Yeah, see, that's what's interesting."

6

In the months after Athens she could not make much sense of him. She had passed him that day on the river, her hopes already fixed on Beijing, with no idea of what was playing on his mind. Or why he might be unhappy. He had captured two world titles, competed at two Olympic Games and just qualified as a doctor.

How bad was that?

But something was clearly eating him. She was studying medicine at Trinity and had moved to a house in Chapelizod, quite close to his apartment. She would be up early for training and he would be just coming home. Another party. Another girl. More beer.

One night he asked her out and she didn't hear from him for a month.

It was on.

It was off.

It was on.

It was off.

She was a chunk in a jigsaw he was trying to figure out.

"The thing about sport," he says, "is the clarity it brings to every aspect of your life. I no longer had that clarity and didn't particularly thrive in the freedom I was given. What most people do in their early 20s, I was doing in my late 20s: drinking, partying, not in a destructive sense but I just went dormant for a while after Athens. I had no focus and went a bit lampy for a while and it just wasn't a fruitful period of my life."

For Jennings, the quest to reach Beijing was the same, sorry replay.

2005: She teams up with Heather Boyle in a double and they finish fifth (promising) at the World Championships in Japan.

2006: Boyle gets injured and is replaced by Niamh Ni Cheilleachair. They finish seventh at the World Championships in Eton.

2007: Ni Cheilleachair is retained for the Olympic qualifier in Munich but they do not perform well.

2008: Jennings goes it alone and requests to be entered for the Heavyweight single. The request is denied. She travels to the World Championships at lightweight and wins a silver medal.

"I was bitterly disappointed I didn't get a chance to go in the heavyweight singles," she says. "I could have finished with the Olympics then and continued with my medicine."

For two years, it felt like she had reached the end. She was never going to be good enough to contend as a heavyweight single, and had given up hope of finding a partner to qualify for the lightweight double. In May 2010, she was staying with Sam's parents and working as an intern in Limerick - Sam was in Crumlin - when she realised she was pregnant.

Eight months later, Clodagh was born. Sam was thrilled. "It's funny," he says, "but the moment she was born I reverted back to who I was before I stopped."

But there was no clarity for Sinead. She was still in the maternity ward when she took the call from Brian Nugent, a coach at Cycling Ireland, inviting her to join his elite track squad. Six weeks later, she flew to Majorca with Clodagh and a travel cot for her first session with the team pursuit squad.

Jennings, Ciara Horne and Caroline Ryan, had one year to try to qualify the team for the London Olympics but after 11 months of training camps and constant travel, their quest was ended by a puncture.

"It all came down to a World Cup meet in Kazakhstan," she says. "We needed to finish about seventh and were going well when we got a puncture. It was ridiculous. We should have been given a restart but there was some umpire there who read the rules wrong and we lost the points and our chance of getting to the Olympics."

But she did get to London - her sister Caitriona had been selected to run in the marathon. "I was delighted for her," she says, "because she really wanted it, but it was tough as well because I had put so much into it and never had a chance. I thought: 'Maybe I chose the wrong sport.'

A month later, she gave birth to a second daughter, Molly, two days after a trip to Croke Park to watch Donegal win the All-Ireland. Three months after that, she brought another Sam home to Donegal and was married. She was 36 years old and it felt like a happy ending. But there was one more twist.

7

The movie of her life will start with a 'sliding doors' moment on a dark evening in Limerick in April 2013. She's on her bike riding home after a 36-hour shift at work and has reached the Shannon Bridge. It's late and she's tired and her whole sporting career is about to pivot on what happens next. If she rides straight across the bridge and home we'll never hear from her again.

But what if she stops? And what if she gazes across the river to the boathouse? St Michael's. Sam's club. And what if the pang she feels in her heart makes her do something she hadn't planned? Because that's how it starts. She rides home and decides, instead of going to bed, that she's going to go for a run.

"She started coming home from work, putting the 'lid' on the double-buggey and running up-and down the ring-road for 90 minutes," Sam says.

The Great Limerick Run Half Marathon was coming up. He jumped on his bike and followed her round for the 79 minutes it took for her to complete the course, and saw something in her he had never spotted before. Her face. Her true face. The bit Tony had wrestled with in the painting.

"I watched her crossing the line and thought, 'this is the environment she is happiest in'," he says. "She's great at medicine and all that other stuff but it's that raw competition when she is happiest."

And then something spooky happened.

Don McLachlan, a highly-rated coach from New Zealand, had just arrived at the National Rowing Centre in Cork and was being given a guided tour of the premises when he stopped to peruse some photos on the Wall of Fame. They were all there: Drea, O'Toole, O'Connor, Maxwell, Holland, Lynch, Towey.

But it was Jennings that interested him.

"God," he said. "We could do with someone like her."

"Well," she's training you know."

"She is?"

"Yeah, she's just won a half marathon."

He drove to Limerick a week later and arranged to meet Sinead. The lightweight double at the Rio Olympics was the target. He'd found a real talent, Claire Lambe, but needed an experienced hand. Sinead was buzzing. It was exactly what she wanted to hear. But there was one slight hitch - she was pregnant.

She trained through the summer and was back in the boat three days after Hannah was born. There were major obstructions - a rib injury, motherhood, a nightmare commute to Cork - but she was determined to roll the dice.

In September 2015, just 10 weeks after hooking-up with Lambe, they travelled together to the World Championships in France. Eleven of the 12 crews that reached the semi-finals on Friday would be going to Rio. Sam was coming over for the weekend and watched the races on an iPhone while waiting to board at Dublin Airport.

"I remember thinking, 'If they can hang on here and make the final it will be the best weekend of my life. But if they don't, and it's the B final, it will be two more days of agony and waiting." They finished fourth. It was a long wait until Sunday.

"The wait between the semi and the B final was terrible," Jennings said. "I just wanted it to be over so I could deal with the consequences. One minute you could see yourself in the Olympic gear and on the plane to Rio and the next, you could see all the crews rowing you down. And your mind was constantly wavering between the two scenarios."

Sunday morning was the worst of Sam's life. "I had never been so nervous or so emotional," he says. "As an athlete, you keep all those emotions under wraps; as a spectator you allow them to run free. But I had never been a spectator before. I had never seen that side to it. People crying before a race with nerves - I was one of them! But you're allowed to do that. You don't have to be in control."

That was Sinead's job, but she was worried, like Atlanta, they had gone out too hard. "We would normally take 33 strokes per minute but I looked down at half-way and we were at 35. 'That's high,' I thought, 'but we'll just keep going. We were leading into the last 500, and looked like we might have it, but then the sprint started and we started going backwards.

Sam almost freaked. He had watched the first 1,500m on the big screen with Niall O'Toole and then sprinted towards the bank where the lead had been cut. "I thought: 'How the fuck have they just lost a length and a half!'" But cometh the hour, cometh the Lambe.

"We got into the last 250 metres and Claire suddenly started shouting," Jennings says: "Thirty strokes! Do it for the girls. Give me 10 for Clodagh."

She pulled ten strokes.

"Give me 10 for Molly."

She dug deep again.

"Give me 10 for Hannah."

She found another ounce.

They had made it. She had made it. Sinead Jennings was going to the Olympics.

8

So, that's it?

Yeah.

You're writing about him but you're really writing about her.

No, I'm writing about her but I'm really writing about him.

You are?

Yeah.

How's that?

Well think about it? What's the real story? The remarkable woman who achieves a life goal and finally makes it to the Olympics? Or the remarkable man who has competed in two but will travel to Rio next week and actually enjoy it for the first time?

Sunday Indo Sport