'We definitely can say we're contenders for a medal. We're going for gold'
IT’S BEEN A whirlwind couple of weeks for Mark Roche, with the birth of his son, Cooper, followed swiftly by confirmation Roche would be competing with the Ireland Sevens at the Paris Olympics next month.
The 31-year-old wasn’t sure he’d make the cut in James Topping’s squad, so Cooper’s impending arrival helped keep any rugby-related stresses at bay.
“It definitely took my mind off it a lot,” says Roche.
“There was a lot of building up, just getting the room ready, the house ready, making sure Jennifer was okay, we were in a good place going into the pregnancy. Yeah, there wasn’t much nerves towards the selection.”
It was a different story for the Tokyo Olympics in 2021, where the Ireland men only secured qualification a month before the Games started. This time, they’ve had over a year to plan and prepare. The extended lead-in has allowed the group more time to wrap their heads around what lies ahead.
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“I said to a couple of guys and Jen at home, [it feels] completely different. Four years ago, I was waiting on a call after the repechage in Monaco, I was the 13th or 14th man, I actually didn’t think I was going to get in the selected 12, and then Anthony [Eddy, former head coach] called me up, three weeks before the Olympics, I was ecstatic, I was over the moon.”
Roche is part of Ireland's 12-man squad for Paris.
Roche will become a two-time Olympian next month, and is a perfect example of how the Sevens programme can offer a different path for rugby players in Ireland.
The Dubliner played Junior and Senior Cup at Blackrock College and was also on schools teams right through to U18 level, before playing for the Ireland U20s. Roche moved west to play U20s with Connacht and was an AIL winner with Lansdowne before his 15s career began to stutter.
“I was actually an event manager in Lansdowne in tag in the summer, and one of the referees got on to me and said ‘I think you’d be great for Sevens, I think it would be a great opportunity to try something different’ and yeah, he was ‘I’ll send on the page’, so I signed on and now I’m going to my second Olympics.
“The IRFU put it out on their website, that there were trials for Sevens. There was fitness testing in Santry, there was a big trial, about 40 players on the back pitch of Lansdowne, we played games that day and that was it.
“Going back nine years, it was quite simple. It was out the back of DCU, Tuesday-Thursdays, some evenings, some during the day, and then the programme picked up a little bit because it was coming into the summer and people had a bit of time off and Academies were coming up, it was very simple and very basic.”
Roche playing for Ireland in 2018.
In those early days of Roche’s Sevens career, becoming an Olympian was far from his mind.
“No, definitely not thinking Olympics. Actually, when I signed up, I didn’t fully know what was going to happen with this programme. It kind of only got to me when we had our qualifier the first time in Monaco in 2016 when I kind of thought it was all real now, there is an Olympics here, it’s possible, and then thinking about the World Series.
“So early on, there was not much thought about what could happen, or where this programme could go.”
All these years later, the Ireland men are heading to their second Olympics with realistic aims of securing a medal, having finished second overall in the World SVNS Series table this season. A big motivation is to improve on their showing in Tokyo, where Ireland failed to make the knockout stages and lost a ninth-place play-off to Kenya.
“The confidence is really high. We’re not overdoing or overthinking it but we definitely can say we are contenders for a medal. We are going for gold, we have the ability to win gold, it’s just small things that if we can fix by ourselves, our own game will be fine. We can definitely take on everybody in Paris.”