From Paris Olympics to water polo, Erin Riordan finding the joy in sport again
The iconic five rings are hard to miss on Erin Riordan's wrist. For a generation of Olympians, the tattoo has become a rite of passage. It's a symbol of a mountain climbed. What it doesn't, can't, say is how the peak was reached.
Or what came next.
Even the placement is interesting. Some get the Games' mark on their hip, or an ankle, or half-hidden on the inside of a bicep. Somewhere it will rarely be seen. Riordan's will catch her eye multiple times a day, but what does she think when she thinks of Paris?
'You do build it up in your head a little bit and then you get there and you're like, 'oh my goodness, the food is not nice, the hotel is not nice'. I got covid when I was over there. I was not well when I raced.
'I tested negative before I raced and I tested positive after I raced, so I got sent home immediately when I tested positive. You walk out and you're like, 'this is it, this is the moment'. And then you're also like, 'oh, this is it'. Two edges of a sword I guess.' Her visit to the French capital had already been shaped to no little degree by a lead-in of what she termed herself as peaks and troughs. In January she thought her opportunity had passed her by. By the spring she was back on track.
A member of Ireland's 400m freestyle relay team, it looked as if they had missed the boat after being edged agonisingly into a ranking of 17th, one place outside the qualifying mark, on the back of the World Championships in Doha.
Riordan had already fallen just short of Tokyo three years earlier so that, she thought, was that. She went to Portugal, where her mum lives, to 'grieve the loss', took up running and detached herself, mind and body, from her existence as a swimmer.
SOMETHING IN THE WATER: Erin Riordan during Team Ireland Paris 2024 Aquatics team training. Pic: David Fitzgerald/Sportsfile
Then the call came that the Japanese would not be sending a quartet and Ireland had a green light. What followed was a scramble, mentally, physically and geographically, as she returned to Dublin and plugged back into the system.
'The few months leading up to Paris were probably the most emotionally strained I've been in my life. Along the way you kind of forget why you're doing it. It becomes, 'I want to make the Games, I want to do this', as opposed to, 'I used to love the sport'.
'And I used to love getting up at 5am.'
She knew pre-Paris that the La Défense Arena would be the stage for her last ever swim. The idea of ever being in a pool again seemed anathema at one point, but then the thought of parking all that skill and experience struck home.
She looked at triathlons and decided that, no, they didn't look much like fun. The other possibility was water polo, which wasn't a simple transition given she had never tried any team sports again. But try it she did.
'A bit humbling at the beginning, going from the Olympics to being the very worst on a team that has 14-year-old girls on it.'
She laughs as that experience is shared, and that's the really important bit here. This, she explained, was fun.
For so long her life has revolved around her sport. Now that was going to be reversed: she wasn't back from Paris a month before starting a full-time job as a documentation specialist at a pharmaceutical company in Dublin.
Erin Riordan with St Vincents WPC teammates in the Irish Water Polo Senior Cup final versus Tribes WPC. Pic: INPHO/Laszlo Geczo
A member of St Vincent's water polo club now, training is a twice weekly affair, and if the sheer physicality of what is renowned as one of the most physically demanding of Olympic sports is a challenge then it's one she's comfortable with.
Maybe the hardest part of it all was the fact that St Vincent's are based at the National Aquatic Centre (NAC) in Abbotstown where she had spent so many hours doing so many laps of the 50m pool in what is now her former life.
'It's fine now but the first time I was walking in I was like - [shudders] - post-traumatic stress disorder from all the training. It's good now, I guess. It's kind of like home even though I didn't want to be there for a while.' She keeps in touch with her swimming friends and colleagues, and even bumps into a few of them at the NAC, but she smiles when she thinks of them ploughing through those six-kilometre sessions and one word comes to mind.
'Enjoy!' she laughs. Water polo isn't Riordan's only new pursuit. She has a marathon to run in Lisbon as well later this year so that's one foot in the pool, the other out. It's a different dynamic and, for her, a better balance.
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