Bryan Keane represented Ireland at two different sports before he found triathlon and now he’ll be combining three sports at the Rio Olympic Games.
The 35-year-old triathlete from Cork started out as a swimmer with a dream of qualifying for an Olympics. From there he moved to running and won a bronze medal in the European Junior Cross Country Championships in 1999.
Following a move to Dublin to study fine art print in the National College of Art and Design Keane decided that he’d had enough of running, got on his bike and was good enough to get on the Irish national team in 2006.
There followed a time back in Cork working as a photographer before a move to Australia to try to further his career and experience a new way of life.
“I was 28 and hadn’t travelled so I had 18 months over there starting in ’09. That’s where I started my sport and it’s a country where they are used to getting Olympic medals in triathlon," he explained when speaking to RTÉ Sport.
“I was in Sydney and I was fortunate that I started racing with a good triathlon club, I had really good exposure to good people and a guy called Jamie Turner, he’s training Gwen Jorgensen, the current world champion, invited me into his house.
"I was just lucky enough to meet him and he invited me to live with him and train with him as one of the guys. Then I came back to Ireland in ’09 and we were lucky Chris Jones had just come in and it was Jamie who put my in contact with Chris so it was just this perfect storm of people coming together and I got my opportunity.
"I grabbed my opportunity, grabbed it with both hands."
Keane will turn 36, on August 20, two days after his event in Rio, which makes him a real veteran in the field.
As he says himself, he is one of the few elite triathletes left who comes from a varied sporting background. Most of the leading men now started to specialise in triathlon from an early age - not their late twenties.
But he insists that this delayed entry to the game means his body feels far younger than it is and leaves him with plenty of competitive racing in his arms and legs.
After finishing tenth in the world sprint championships - which is half the distance of the Olympic 1500m swim, 40km cycle and 10km run, all done in well less than two hours - in 2010 he was knocked off his bike on a training spin.
There followed two long and lonely years of rehabilitation and a failed bid to qualify for his first Olympics at London 2012.
"It was a horrible thing to happen and you wouldn’t wish it on anyone, but it happened and I got on with it,” said Keane. "The only thing I could do was get on with it and I took it day-by-day. I didn’t take no as an answer.
"I was dogged enough and maybe stupid enough to keep going and keep going - I got back to a point where I was back racing and eventually I found myself in another Olympic cycle. I’m back now at a level that I was at before and this year alone has been my most consistent season."
Keane’s sport involves swim, bike, run and to make that happen his life is basically eat, sleep, train. He trains three times a day most days, weekly swimming up to 30km in the pool, as much as 400km on the bike and covering 100km running.
But it isn’t always going to be this way and one day he says he’ll return to his creative calling.
"I worked as a photographer and my degree is in print so it’s pretty wide open," he said. "That’s where my passion lies and it’s something I would like to go back into. How do I crack into an industry like that? That’s the next question.
"I have a huge love for anything creative. Whether it’s fine art, or advertising, or whatever field, I have a wealth of experience of essentially being a sole trader for the past 12 years, running like my own little business.
"If you’re a creative person you can always find outlets, no matter where it is."
