Para Swimmer, Jonathan McGrath, is determined to make the most of the second chace that the postponement of Tokyo 2020 has given him. The Clare man who trains at the University of Limerick admits that he had been struggling for form prior to lockdown but that the extra time that the pandemic has afforded him gives him a massive opportunity to qualify for the rescheduled Tokyo Paralympic Games.
Jonathan McGrath joined the Para Swimming Manager, Hayley Burke, to talk about Para Swimming, the impact of lockdown, returning to training and looking forward to the future. To see the full interview follow this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKSeMlepj5g
McGrath displayed typical honesty when assessing his form prior to lockdown “To be honest, I don’t think I was going to qualify for Tokyo unfortunately. So, while Covid has given me another year to train and to try and work on a few things, try and get a little bit stronger, work on a few technical things …it’s good now I’ve got another year to knuckle down and try to get that qualifying time.’
Hayley Burke is the Para Swimming Manager for Paralympics Ireland and has the responsibility for preparing the swimming team for the games and for ensuring that the athletes preparation is perfect after the lockdown. Burke spoke about the challenges that have presented themselves this year ‘This is the biggest challenge and we’ve linked in with coaches all over the world throughout lockdown. I suppose nothing like this has ever happened before, swimmers have never been out of the water more than a couple of weeks at a time and normally when they are out a couple of weeks it’s due to scheduled rest, injury or illness. So, it’s unknown territory, it’s still unknown territory, the only thing that we could do and the best thing to do was just to take it really easy. We went back very slow and very steady, started off with low duration of sessions and built up the duration then built up the intensity. We just had to heavily tap into sport science and make sure that we were being really, really cautious.”
Looking forward to the European Championships that have been scheduled for Madiera, the scene of McGrath’s biggest disappointmen,t he is hoping to exorcise a few demons “I remember coming out of the pool in 2016 in buckets of tears, texting my friends, texting my parents, texting family members because at that time I felt that I let people down but I didn’t really I gave everything that I could have but it would be nice to go back there and prove a point to myself that I should be back at Tokyo 2021 and it would be nice to pick up my first international medal and I’ll be 28 then.’
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