Countdown to Tokyo: “It’s a weird one to try and wrap your head around”
By Daire Walsh
HE MAY be just 11 days away from leading the first ever Irish rugby team out onto the Olympic stage, but Terenure College RFC’s Billy Dardis has admitted it will be some time before he can fully appreciate the magnitude of what he is about to do.
Following a superb triumph at the World Repechage Tournament in Monaco last month, Ireland got their hands on the 12th and final place in the rugby sevens for the Tokyo Games.
They are due to face South Africa, United States and Kenya at the group stages of the competition, which begins on July 26 and concludes just two days later, with the top two teams in each pool guaranteed a quarter-final spot.
“It was pretty raw straight afterwards [in Monaco]” recalled Dardis. “There was a lot of emotion, not just from myself, but from the whole team.
“We were kind of just laughing on the pitch, thinking ‘we’re actually going to the Olympics, we’re Olympians’. It’s still a weird one to try and wrap your head around, just because of the enormity of it.
“It’s starting to hit home a little bit, but I still think that we won’t really realise for a long time how big of a deal this really is and how special it is to be part of an Olympics, especially at a time like this, when the world is going through the troubles that it is” he said.
Given the IRFU’s sevens programme is currently based at the Sport Ireland campus in Blanchardstown, you would think Dardis and his team-mates would have had ample opportunities to talk with some of Ireland’s past Olympians about any potential pitfalls they may encounter in the Japanese capital.
While the Ireland skipper is yet to converse with any athletes, the presence of Professor Phil Glasgow as the Head of Physiotherapy & Rehabilitation within the rugby union is proving to be a massive help.
The Tyrone native previously worked as Team GB’s Chief Physiotherapist at the 2016 Rio Olympics and has been assisting the sevens squad in their mental and physical preparations.
“We actually had a few meetings with him throughout the year” said Dardis. “He was giving us a sense of how big of an event this is and how lost you can get in it.
“That’s the thing that he spoke to us about, it can really overwhelm athletes when they go to the Olympics. That you see all these big names and people can run around looking for athletes.
“Looking for Usain Bolt and Yohan Blake, trying to get pictures with them. He was saying ‘we had guys coming into us with achilles pain and then we had a look at their step count, and guys had racked up 25,000 steps on a day off.”
“Running around the Olympic village, trying to chase people! I suppose this one will be a bit different with Covid.
“We’ll be pretty restricted in the Olympic village. It will be a bit different, but I can only imagine that it will be quite an event” he insisted.
