The Vortex - April 2026: Mona McSharry Not Done With LA2028 California-Dreaming
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April 3
Mona McSharry, the toast of Ireland in 2024 when she made the Olympic podium in Paris, is taking it a day at a time when it comes to whether she will still be in the race come LA2028 but the runes from the training pool tell her: " I do see myself racing in 2028."
In a feature in the Irish Times today, McSharry tells by Ian O'Riordan that she didn't dip a toe into the water for five months after claiming an historic bronze for her nation in the 100m breaststroke at the Paris 2024 Olympics - and wasn't sure if she would ever make it back to racing.
Here's the race that made McSharry Ireland's first-ever Olympic medallist in a women's breaststroke event:
Craig Lord
With bronze, McSharry, of Grange in Sligo, fulfilled a childhood dream, O'Riordan notes as he describes her early life and start in swimming.
Her Olympic Height achieved, it took McSharry until December 2024 to get back into the water at the University of Tennessee, in Knoxville after she was offered an extension of her scholarship after four years so that she could continue to race for her American hosts.
Only then, did she get a sense that LA2028 was not the reach too far she thought it might be. She tells O'Riordan:
"I didn’t think I had another four-year Olympic block in me. I didn’t plan to be swimming longer than that, just thought I’d be done naturally. Then college offered me another year of scholarship, to race with them. Then I loved the training block from April 2025 into the [July 2025] World Championships ... Then I thought I’d do one more year, have been really enjoying it so far, especially the training aspect. And that’s what you have to do, leading up to the Olympics. So I kind of came to the decision, in January, February of this year, that 2028 might be on the books. I’m still leaving it [LA] open. If I turn around tomorrow and want to be done, I’m going to let myself do that. I don’t want to push through if I’m not enjoying it. But I do see myself racing in 2028. Especially the way I’m feeling now about training.”
McSharry is now home in Ireland ahead of racing at the Irish Open in Bangor from April 8 to 12. On the line, selection for the European Championships in Paris in August, her target events, as ever, the 100m and 200m breaststroke.
The Irish Times feature in full:
Ian O’Riordan
The paper also has a fine feature on John Szaranek, the Scot now leading the drive to find the next wave of Irish talent in the pool:
Coach to Irish bolter of the year in the pool, World and European junior champion John Shortt - a 19-year-old from Galway based at the Limerick performance centre - Szaranek tells Muireann Duffy that the backstroke ace is "a fine example of" what Ireland is looking:
“One of the big jobs that I was given here was to develop athletes and get them up to a level where we could start making an impact both at national level and then international level. We want to try and give athletes the best opportunity to succeed here. I don’t want them going away to America, I don’t want them going away to university in Loughborough or Stirling or places like that. [Now] they understand that they can actually be successful here.”
The feature in full:
Muireann Duffy
The Irish Open starts in Bangor next Wednesday:
Tunisian Switches To Swim For Saudi After Easing Of Nationality Rule
Rami Rahmouni, a talented swimmer from Tunisia, will represent Saudi Arabia in international waters after the rules on transfers of sporting nationality were eased last year in a move by World Aquatics leaders without reference to Congress:
Craig Lord
Rahmouni, 17, last represented Tunisia at World short-course titles in 2024. He was just 15, and his best finish was 20th in the 800m freestyle a year after he'd won the 1500 at the Arab Games. His best 30-length time is 15:05.43 but he will now not continue the Tunisian tradition of producing top distance swimmers, Oussama Mellouli, then Ahmed Hafnaoui, and in 2025 Ahmed Jaouadi, all having claimed World titles (the first two also including Olympic gold, and WADA-Code penalties in their careers).
The President of the Federation referred to the existence of “Tunisian parties,” who she didn’t name, that caused this change of citizenship.
The Espérance sports club of Tunisia is Rahmouni's swimming alma mater, and the place where head official Hichem Najjar described the change of nationality as “sports smuggling”. Arrangements were said to have been made by the swimmers parents for “a large sum of money”.
Najjar worried that precedent is being set and that other top swimmers may decide to make the same switch. He has called on the Tunisian Ministry of Sport to intervene. All nations, to greater or lesser degree, are vulnerable to what is now much easier to suffer: nurturing and funding young talent only to watch it abandon the nation on the cusp of international breakthrough, and that to a country with no home-grown, world-class talent in the pool.
Under Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 initiative, it offers to pay and grant citizenship to elite athletes. Sums are said, in extreme cases such as speculation associated with Kenyan marathon great Eliud Kipchog, to extend to a phenomenal US$1 billion, with massive annual wages and performance bonuses on top.
Saudi, where former Ireland performance director Jon Rudd - is leading the swimming program, is not the first Middle East nation to attempt to buy foreign talent instead of developing its own. At a time when the rules were tougher, cases included the 2005 attempt by Qatar of buying South African 4x100m free Olympic champions Ryk Neethling and Roland Schoeman over $1 million each to abandon their country.
Also in the April Vortex:
- Federica Pellegrini & Matteo Giunta Welcome Rachele, Daughter No2
- Jane Asher Still Setting Global Standards At 95
- April 1: Peaty & Main Plot Unexpected Tilt At Olympic 50m Free
- FORUM: May One Seismic Shift On Olympic Heights Follow Another
