PARALYMPIC GAMES:JAMES BROWN and Damien Shaw came and stood in the mixed zone, their world nothing but twilight just for the moment. They knew they'd done well, they just didn't know how well.
The talk was that they’d made it into third in the individual B time trial but in the fraught minutes after a race like this, talk is a kite string when really what you need is a rope ladder. Cue the man on the PA system. “And in bronze medal position, representing Ireland . . .”
The pair of them dropped their tandem bike to the ground and grabbed each other, both lost for words but neither in need of a syllable. Brown is a blind 47-year-old from Portaferry, Shaw his granite hard 28-year-old sighted pilot from Mullingar. After coming desperately close to a medal in the velodrome last week, Brown was reasonably sage and sanguine while Shaw visibly burned beside him. This result pinned all regrets to the board and stuck a dart in the heart of them.
For Brown, this was a third Paralympic medal, having won two in athletics for Britain in 1984. In fact when Brown won his last medal, Shaw was less than three weeks old. The world does weave itself into the most extraordinary patterns sometimes.
“It makes up for all the disappointment on the track,” said Shaw. “We had a lot of aggression going out there. I took [last week] very hard because the lines weren’t great, the pacing wasn’t 100 per cent and that played on our minds. We made up for it here. Look, we’re f**king delighted.”
Less than half an hour later, Catherine Walsh and Fran Meehan came through in equally doolally form on the back of their second medal of the Games. Their wait was a lot less anxious, as they knew more or less as soon as they crossed the line that bronze was theirs. As a pair, they’re not dissimilar to Brown and Shaw – the blind older stager alongside the raw power of the younger sighted pilot. The pressure off after their silver on the track, they went for everything here and were paid in spades.
“Absolutely delighted,” said Walsh, the 39-year-old from Swords. “Months ago I said to Fran, ‘You know, we could actually get two medals out there’ because we are consistently good at the time trial and we didn’t go too crazy after the track. We tried not to get too hyped. We got the rest in. Our legs didn’t feel particularly good [on Tuesday] and we were particularly nervous. But we just warmed up today and felt ‘yeah’. It felt good.”
At the end of day seven, this means that Ireland has four cycling medals to luxuriate in with at least one more expected when the unstoppable Mark Rohan goes in his road race tomorrow. Any thoughts as to why?
“I think it is the attitude of everybody,” said Meehan. “We all want the best out of each other. We do help each other if we can. We all kind of motivate each other as well and everybody is all the time looking for better equipment and better ways of training and getting the most out of everybody and we share it around.”
