It's been a tough week for our boxers in Rio.
They would have felt shame and embarrassment following their link to doping allegations, and it's hard not to think about their team captain, Paddy Barnes, after his shock defeat on Tuesday, and what he experienced over the last few years, weeks, days and hours.
Boy, how painful must that fight have been for him.
Having competed in London at 75kg, I struggled with weight for a number of years. I stand now about 87kg and often wonder how I ever made the 75kg limit.
Quite simply the answer lies in relentless suffering: physically, emotionally and mentally.
At 75kg I was a mere shadow of the man I am today and it was quite obvious in looking at Paddy’s colour, his skeletal facial structure and exasperated efforts, that he too suffered from the effects of drastic weight 'cuts'.
I have known Paddy for a long time and I have seen first-hand the extremities he has endured in making weight. Considering all he has won, the levels of training he has undertaken with a hugely limited calorie intake beggars belief.
In my experience of making drastic weight drops, I went through weeks of starvation, weeks were you barely have the energy to answer the door, weeks where everything said and done makes you want to tear your hair out, where food and liquid are all you can think about, and weeks were everything is measured in how it will affect your weight.
Lots of people don’t understand the complexities of boxers making weight. It is a cruel and distant memory for me now, thankfully, but one I empathise with.
It involves hardship and suffering in training, to the point where you question what you ever enjoyed about the sport.
And then comes the fight!
The night before Paddy’s fight didn’t involve fuelling up, hydrating and a good sleep like other athletes, in other sports.
For Paddy, it involved training in a sweatsuit, yet again, as he has done every day for weeks.
It involved a sleepless night, dehydration headaches, a dry mouth and rumbling hunger pangs. It involved getting on the official scales the next morning and having only a few hours to try recover on limited food and fluid intake as he again would have to battle the scales for his next fight if he won.
In my experiences I could usually feel my legs tire first, halfway through the fight everything became harder and everything required extra effort.
With dieting deprivation, your muscles’ glycogen levels had long being deteriorated and everything became a struggle.
You could see this in Paddy’s breathing early in the fight as he raced to pump oxygen to the failing muscles.
While I don’t think for a moment, despite what he said, that Paddy would be embarrassed in his next fight, I can say first hand that it gets harder with each fight and each day; making that limit, coupled with the labour of each fight, definitely takes its toll on the body and your performances.
In such conditions, to display such a performance, Paddy’s heart, and his commitment to the cause, to representing our nation and in bagging us a massive medal haul around the world, is testament to his persona.
Much has been made of his Twitter antics but such is Barnes that he won’t mind the critics, he won’t complain about what many thought was a poor decision by the judges.
He won’t succumb to the frailties of a normal individual because Paddy is far from normal, Paddy is a champion.
* Darren O'Neill fought for Ireland at the London Olympics in 2012, captaining the Irish boxing team at the Games.
