One of the most gratifying aspects of seeing Mona McSharry start Ireland's medal charge at Paris 2024 wasn't just because of which nation she was representing.
And it wasn't just because she hails from one of the north-west counties.
About a week before flying out to the Games, McSharry and other Team Ireland swimmers gathered at the Crowne Plaza hotel in Blanchardstown and when it was time to speak to McSharry, the Sligo swimmer was relaxed and all smiles as she opened up about her build-up to her second Olympics.
"I just questioned why am I doing this and I was very unhappy. I love it very differently now," she said, when asked how she had fallen back in love with the sport.
The genesis for the question lay in comments she had made at the start of the year. Speaking to RTÉ Sport's James McMahon, a fellow Sligo native, she poured out her heart and soul about the depths she had plunged to in the summer of 2022 when the demands of college and elite swimming got on top of her.
"It just came to a head some Sunday in the middle of summer," she said.
"I remember waking up and I was really upset, crying, I didn't know why I was crying. I was really unhappy. I called my friends from home, I was talking to them anyway, we talked through it and they helped me realise what was going on and I didn’t realise it stemmed from swimming.
"I thought I was just stressed from school, from other things, and never really realised that maybe swimming was the cause. I had come to the conclusion that I hated swimming, I really disliked it, and that's all I do, especially in summer when I don’t have classes."
McSharry did not seek professional help to deal with that low-point but did open up to family, friends and coaches. Fast forward to this summer and a new mindset shone just as brightly as the medal that is forever hers.
At the same Crowne Plaza event where a relaxed McSharry spoke about putting swimming in perspective again, her Ireland swim team-mate Danielle Hill was also very open about the anguish she had faced in the years after her Olympics debut in Tokyo.
To deal with it, she went down a different route to McSharry but with a similarly positive outcome. The Antrim swimmer consulted London 2012 Olympian and sports psychologist Jessie Barr, who is here in Paris as part of RTÉ Sport's coverage, and it involved baring her soul in a way that she had not been accustomed to.
"That first initial conversation, I sat in tears for 45 minutes with a stranger that I had never met and from that point, I realised there was something that wasn't right and my coach told me that I came back from the World Championships as a different athlete than I left, so that was hard to hear," she said.
"People around me tell me (these things) but when I sat down for that first conversation it was like, 'OK, there's an issue', and it was then how do we move forward."
As Hill told me in Blanchardstown, she was now "swimming happier" and it showed because she had a wide smile on her face as she uttered those words.
'Happy birthday granny!'
— RTÉ Sport (@RTEsport) July 27, 2024
The women's 4x100m relay team in good spirits after their heat and looking forward to the meet ahead.#rtesport #paris2024
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In Paris, she tackled two individual events and two relays and it was notable that after one of the relay races, so relaxed was she that her focus quickly switched to a shout-out to her grandmother who was celebrating her birthday.
Boxer Aidan Walsh was also similarly open about his approach to addressing his mental health struggles a few weeks earlier when speaking at the Sport Ireland HQ.
In a similar vein to Hill, he also went down the sports psychologist route and the Tokyo bronze medalists philosophical approach to his opening round defeat to France's Makan Traore highlighted how the highs and lows of sport did not have to be defining.
His words to RTÉ Sport in the wake of that early loss summed it up perfecty: "Regardless of win, lose or draw, it is what it is. I'm healthy, I’m happy."
All those experiences that McSharry, Hill and Walsh had opened up about came back into view after sitting in on taekwondoin Jack Woolley's opening round defeat at the Grand Palais on Wednesday afternoon.
"I'm obviously very upset but you know what, I'm super proud of myself. Six months ago I wouldn't have seen myself here in the headspace that I'm in," he told RTÉ Sport as he reflected on what had transpired against Gashin Magomedov.
"I wasn't sure about whether I was going to make it to the Games because we didn't qualify through ranking and I had to go to the Olympic qualifiers and I hit a really tough space in life in general.
"It was like, do you know what, just give it this one last go. I had an amazing team with me in Sport Ireland to work with me and just get me in the right space.
"To come here today, that was my main goal to come in and enjoy it and just show myself that six months ago I wasn't here."
His openness was another reminder of just how much Team Ireland's athletes have had to contend with on the way to Paris.
While McSharry may be coming home with a well-earned medal, others are not but it's clear that each and every one of them have had victories that go well beyond the confines of sporting achievement.
Watch the 2024 Olympic Games with 14 hours of televised action on RTÉ2 and RTÉ Player each day. Listen to extensive radio coverage on RTÉ Radio 1 and 2fm's Game On and follow each moment from Paris on RTÉ.ie, the RTÉ News app and all RTÉ digital platforms. Listen to the daily RTÉ Sport Olympics Podcast.
