Dorothy Dermody’s Olympic career lasted one day.
That one day was 76 years ago next Wednesday and it happened in the Palace of Engineering in Wembley in north London during the 1948 Games.
She was drawn in Pool One of the women’s foil event in the fencing and her record by the end of it was six bouts, six defeats. Bottom of the table, the first entrant to exit the competition.
This kind of thing happens at an Olympics. It is, in fact, by far the most typical Olympic experience. It has to be. Somewhere in the region of 10,500 athletes will compete over the coming fortnight. They will suit up and warm-up and get into their own private mental space. The majority of them won’t make it past the first round.
Dorothy Dermody wasn’t even supposed to take part. Not in the fencing anyway. She was an Irish champion in the foil – and would continue to be for a few years after London. But it wasn’t even her first sport. She was also an Irish diving champion and was originally chosen to compete in the pool rather than on the fencing mat. But she changed her mind in the run-up to the Games and asked could she go fencing instead.
One day. Gone. When you sign up for an Olympic journey, you run the risk of the end being sudden and swift and cold.
From the moment last Wednesday when Spanish right-back Marc Pubil scored the opener against Uzbekistan in the men’s soccer competition, Paris 2024 was – is – a process of ruthless, relentless winnowing. Most of those taking part will experience a mayfly Olympics. You’re in, you’re out, you’re done. Have a nice life. Don’t forget to swap pins.
Dorothy Dermody had an incredible life. She grew up in Cloughjordan, Co Tipperary, the daughter of a ship’s captain. The story went that because her father could only ever bring one female companion with him when he went away on voyages, he and his wife dressed young Dorothy up as a boy and smuggled her aboard. Hence, she became known as Tommy, a name that stayed with her for life.
Everyone has a skin the outside world sees, one that can’t be shaken even if you wish it were possible. Sometimes it’s a nickname. Sometimes it’s an event. For Olympians, this fortnight is generally a before-and-after moment. Something that will live after you, regardless of how well or badly it goes.
At 39 years old, Tommy Dermody was the oldest member of the 1948 Irish Olympic team. As “Ireland” had only become the state’s official name following the constitutional referendum in 1937 (prior to that it was the Irish Free State), she went into the history books as the first female athlete to represent Ireland at an Olympics.
Ireland had four other women representing us at those Olympics but they were all in the art competition. Let’s just say Dermody was the first woman to sweat for Ireland at the Olympics.
This stuff survives, left like a fossil for generations after you to find. That’s not always the easiest thing to get your head around. In Athens in 2004, the Belfast swimmer Michael Williamson talked to the press after finishing sixth in his heat, a second outside his personal best. Asked what happened, he said he stood on the pool deck. He said he looked around and remembered he was at the Olympics. And then? “I shit myself.”
Dorothy Dermody came home from London and got on with her life. Her day at the 1948 Olympics became just another thing she did, a single tree ring among many. She played lacrosse and squash for Ireland. She taught PE at Alexandra College, where one of her pupils was Maeve Kyle, later to become the first Irish woman to compete in athletics at an Olympics.
The Olympics are such an intense experience. We make so much of them, having ignored the sports involved for the 206 weeks that pass between one Games and the next. We saddle those involved with outsized expectations and search their performances for broader themes and meaning. It’s a silly thing, defining a pretty random group of sportspeople by a particular couple of weeks in the broad sweep of their lives. Watch us do it anyway.
Dorothy Dermody was so much more than her Olympics. She kept pushing boundaries when she came home, coaching fencing and diving, working with kids and helping them along. For four years in the 1950s, she had a show on Radio Éireann, a 15-minute afternoon slot where she taught the fundamentals of swimming and diving.
She was a lively member of the Dublin social scene too. Her partner was Count Cyril McCormack, son of the famous tenor, John. They lived next door to playwright Hugh Leonard in Dalkey.
She was secretary of the Dublin Wine Society and the couple ran a wine import business in Booterstown. Cyril was a guest on the first ever episode of The Late Late Show. Dorothy fronted a campaign to have a playground installed in every school in Ireland.
The Games are the Games. They are the be-all and end-all this week and next week and then they’re history. For some of the 10,500, it will last the 10 seconds it takes to run the heats of the 100m. And then they will gather their stuff and head home, a line entry in OlympicSportsReference.com and, in the wider imagination, not a whole lot more.
But a life is a life too. Dorothy Dermody lived to be 102. Before her death in 2012 – three weeks short of her 103rd birthday – she wasn’t just Ireland’s oldest Olympian, she was the oldest Olympic fencer on the planet. Her day in Wembley in 1948 lived after her right to the end.
Every other day did, too.
