Kieran Shannon: Dunlevy and McCrystal — now Irish sport's best double act
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In the long history of Irish sport there can’t be a more successful tandem than Dunlevy and McCrystal. Some names that are virtually synonymous with one another may be bigger – Purcell and Stockwell; English and Fox; Kelly and Roche; O’Gara-Stringer or O’Gara-O’Connell – but hardly better. Only O’Donovan-McCarthy, fellow podium winners in Paris this past month, can rival them as a one-two punch from and for Ireland to serially deliver medals.
When on Sunday in their last race together Katie-George Dunlevy and Eve McCrystal finished second in the Paralympics women’s B 3000 individual pursuit final, it was their 21st time winning a medal at a Paralympics or world championships. Time trials, road races, individual or tandem pursuit, it hasn’t mattered: they’ve persisted, competed, excelled.
And yet for a long time sport wasn’t for Katie-George. It didn’t care or cater for her. Growing up in the UK as the daughter of a Donegal man who worked as a chef in Gatwick, Katie-George would have to sit on the side of the school pitch and school hall while the others played ball sports.
At 11 she was diagnosed with RP (retinis pigmentosa), a hereditary eye disease which leads to progressive visual loss. She naturally struggled to cope with news and having to move to a school for the blind. But there they had sports that she could not only partake in but thrive at, winning national titles in swimming and a European athletics bronze medal in the 400m.
At university then where she was studying marine environmental science, she took up rowing, a sport she’d win world championship medals in for Great Britain. She was pushing hard for a spot on the Paralympics national team but after an injury the system seemed to lose interest in her, prompting her to gravitate to the one in Ireland, where she’d happy memories of playing on the beaches of Donegal with her cousins.
After a while though she found she’d had enough of the boat, only to be pointed in the direction of the bike by Cycling Ireland’s then technical director Brian Nugent. By 2011 she was competing in green at the road world championships and within a couple of years had teamed up with McCrystal, an able-bodied former triathlete from Ballybay, County Monaghan, who was on for being her pilot.
In ways they were and are so different. Katie has RT; Eve’s eyesight is literally 20:20. Katie, for all her dry wit, is shy and hates confrontation; Eve is outgoing, assertive, “the bitch in this relationship,” as she half-joked on Sunday. Katie likes her rest and lie-ins; Eve, as a Garda and a single mother of two kids, is up at six every morning.
And yet they clicked. As McCrystal put it when I met them in 2016 after they’d won two golds in Rio, “We might be very different off the bike but on it we’re the one person. We want the same things.” For themselves and particularly for the other.
“As the pilot, all I wanted to do in Rio was steer Katie to that medal,” McCrystal would say in that 2016 sitdown. “I could have taken a corner the wrong way and she wouldn’t have medalled. She can never get a gold medal on her own, because of her sight limitations. She depends on me.”
On the bike she is Katie’s eyes. They tell a story about the time they were in a bunch in World Cup road race in Italy in 2015 when Eve’s eyes were drawn to a pothole. You know the way you tend to follow where your eyes go. SMASH! The pair of them went straight into the hole and then crashing onto the ground, leaving Katie with her head split open and missing the next race.
“That had nothing to do with Katie,” said McCrystal. “She didn’t see that pot hole. That was all on me. But Katie never, ever made me feel that I was wrong.”
Such mishaps are part of Katie’s life as much as her extraordinary athletic talent and exploits. When I asked her back then about whether she would work in an area related to her degree upon her athletic retirement, she shook her head. “And I won’t be able to work in a shop or someplace like this,” she said in the café. “I tend to walk into things and spill coffee over everyone.
“But I’ve learned so much from sport – how to work with people, how, if you work hard, you’ll find a solution and get a result – that I’ll find something.”
McCrystal has also had her own challenges during her and Dunlevy’s remarkable winning streak. Holding down a job, raising two kids, all the while trying to fulfil her and Katie’s sporting dreams,as she so emotionally put it last Sunday, “It’s been fucking hard. I lost my father and I think I just kept the grief and everything in.”
On Sunday though she couldn’t hide her joy and also her affection for Dunlevy. As Eoghan Cormican noted in these pages, “On the second lap of their silver celebration, Eve let back her hand. Reaching out to grab it was the west Sussex woman who has come to be her sister. The hands remained clasped for an entire lap. One last lap together.”
Then when they were on the podium together, she again reached for Katie’s right hand and together they raised their arms and punched the air. Winners. Sisters.
“We have a special bond which we will have forever,” Katie noted on Sunday. They’ve crashed together. Cried together. Trained together, and apart, but relentlessly (“Six days a week, every single week for a decade,” said Eve on Sunday. “We have never ever faltered or taken our foot off the gas. We have committed every single day.”). Won together.
“Those memories and special moments,” said Katie, “nobody will know what that feels like except for me and Eve.”
Out on their own. Together.