Derry native Orla Chennaoui is passionate about sport: the former two-time triple-jump champion is Eurosport's lead cycling presenter and, she told Oliver Callan on The Ryan Tubridy Show, although track and field was her first love, Derry's glory days in the football championship – culminating in their All-Ireland win in 1993 – also formed a major part of her passion for all kinds of sport. Growing up in Derry in the 1990s wasn't all Derry Girls, though – or was it? Orla reckons the smash-hit sitcom did a great job of showing just how normal life in Troubles-era Derry was if you were living through it:
"You try to tell people what it was like growing up and it seems almost unreal that you had, you know, army in the streets and checkpoints when you were trying to leave home and coming back to home and your boot checked and, you know, always just this element of fear. But at the same time, what's also quite strange about it is, as a kid, it was a very free childhood. You know, I only have happy memories of my childhood."
Coaching for girls doing the triple jump was widely available when Orla went to college, so she set her sights on a career in journalism. In 2005 she was Ireland correspondent for Sky News, when the death of George Best was the first big story she had to cover.
"It was such a huge event, there were thousands of people along the street and I was broadcasting all of that live, while we had the helicopter up in the air and Eamonn Holmes and Kay Burley were at Stormont. It just felt like I had jumped straight into the deep end."
Initially Orla thought she might like to be a war correspondent, but when Sky were looking for an Olympics correspondent just before the London Games, she remembered how much she'd always loved the Olympics:
"So I thought, 'Well, actually,' – this lightbulb went off in my head – 'I remember! I wanted to go to the Olympic Games!' I hadn't planned to go as a broadcaster, but I thought I'd apply for that."
She got the job and absolutely loved reporting on the huge variety of sport that is the Olympic Games. There was, she told Oliver, no looking back from that moment. But, Oliver wanted to know, did Orla not regret the earlier lack of coaching for girls that, were things set up differently, could have meant she was competing at the Games, rather than reporting from them? Orla believes that elite athletes are made of different stuff than the rest of us – and she doesn't think she has that different stuff when it comes to competing in the biggest arenas.
"They have something that makes them push themselves further than any of us will ever feel the need to... There's something that makes them drive themselves and I realised – I didn't realise, I guess, until I became Olympics correspondent, that that's something that I just didn't have. And I'm an incredibly hard worker and I do feel like I push myself harder than a lot of people, but there's something about elite athletes that sets them apart and there's a reason that most of us don't get to fulfil our dreams."
Then comes the starting-a-family-and-effect-on-career question which, as a listener pointed out by text, only women ever seem to get asked. But if she's put out by it, Orla doesn't show it in her answer:
"I had built so much of a career by the time I had my daughter 6 years ago, Eve, that I felt I was able to step away from it a little bit, but still go back knowing that I had all of the experience and had proven myself. And so it was easier to step into it again."
The way society views motherhood struck Orla as particularly strange, given how fatherhood is not seen in the same way at all:
"Society is still such that mothers bear more responsibility, or they're told that they should bear more responsibility, or they feel that so much of the family life has to be down to them – whether that's true or not in any given family – and you don't know how that's going the affect you, you don't know how that's going to affect your ambition."
The fact that she had a daughter first made it feel more important for Orla to be able to show her daughter that she would be able to pursue her career, regardless of her gender and regardless of whether or not she has children.
"Of course when you become a mother or a parent, you understand that being a parent in itself is a full-time job. But I think because I had a daughter, I felt that extra responsibility to show her that doors wouldn't close on her, it was her choice as to what she wanted to do."
You can hear Oliver's full conversation with Orla Chennaoui – including her views on women's participation in sport and the media's coverage of women's sport – by going here.
Niall Ó Sioradáin