PEOPLE are losing their loved ones and their jobs and I think if the worst you can say is that some of your plans got postponed, that’s not too bad really,” Sive Brassil said, reflecting on how the best-laid plans, even Olympics-sized ones, can go astray.

‘Wisdom before years’ applies to this 26-year-old old Tokyo modern pentathlon hopeful, now back in full-on training mode in Dublin after lockdown was spent at home in Ballinasloe, a laser gun beam away from Liz Scott’s house and stables which circles back to the recently-featured ISPCA inspector Karen Lyons, another of Scott’s proteges.

“Ah, Karen takes me back to my early Pony Club days! She used to teach me when I was seven or eight and I remember going to Ballygar, where she worked at the time, to do our show jumping league finals.

“And yes, Minty was my first pony, passed down to me from Mary, Michael and Maeve. By the time I got to ride him, he was a “push button” pony!” added Sive about the little blue roan legend of the local East Galway Hunt Pony Club branch.

“Liz found the first ponies for our family but by the time I got him, he was an old professional. Mum [Fiona] and Dad [Michael] weren’t really from a horsey background and when they decided to take horses up, I’d say Liz was helping them every step of the way.

“We lived so close to her and kept our ponies in her field and stables and kind of spent our summers there.

“My favourite early Pony Club memories would have to be doing pre-novice pairs at hunter trials with my good friend Aoife Burke. Our parents would laugh that they always knew where we were on the course because they could hear us chatting away to each other as we went around.”

Of all the Irish Pony Club competitions, it was the tetrathlon that Sive and her family excelled at. “I got into tetrathlon through my older brothers and sisters. As the youngest sibling, I was always looking up to them and wanted to do whatever they did. As soon as I started tetrathlon, I knew it was for me.

“I loved the multi-sport element and I really loved training hard and competing from a young age, so modern pentathlon was a natural progression for me when I heard about it.

"It was an opportunity to keep doing what I loved, to learn another new sport [fencing] and to hopefully one day bring my passion to an Olympic level.”

Career choice

Aside from Minty and the family’s love of tetrathlon sports, there is one path of hers that differs from her four older siblings - career choice. Michael, Colm and Maeve all followed their father Michael, an obstetrician, by studying Medicine.

“And Mary is a physio so that’s another kind of medical thing, I guess!” she said with a laugh. “I studied languages at UCD because I enjoyed languages in school but I hadn’t given much thought to a career outside of sport. I really enjoyed doing an Arts degree because it gave me a chance to flex my creative muscles, alongside all of my training for the five sports.”

“I graduated in French and Spanish. I was lucky to get the opportunity to use it when I went to Paris to train so I brushed up on my French while I was over there.

“I graduated in 2017, so that year, 2017-2018, I spent a full year in France training with the French pentathlon team. That was kind of my little Erasmus post-degree!

“It was an invaluable experience for me, both in terms of honing my French language skills and improving my performance.”

So what is the modern pentathlon, or “contest of five events” going back to its Olympic origins when it was modelled on the requisites of a cavalry officer? Sive listed the five elements of the sport; fencing, running, shooting, (formerly-used pistols have since been replaced by laser guns), swimming and show jumping.

“From an equestrian point of view, it’s probably most of interest that we don’t own or ride our own horses. The competition provides a pool of horses and depending on how the competition is going, the leader going into the riding element will pick a number out of a hat and then the horses are drawn in accordance with that.

“So you have 20 minutes for a warm-up and five warm-up jumps to do on a horse that you’ve never seen before and then you have to go in and do a round of show jumping,” she explained about its format, similar to the now-defunct final round of previous world show jumping championships where the top four riders swapped horses.

“The track would be 1.20m, so it’s quite a challenge and it’s a bit of a raffle as well because there’s only so much you can do in 20 minutes. There’s an element of luck in that there’s going to be horses that are a lot better and a lot easier than others that might suit a certain rider better than another one.

“I guess the main goal is to try and figure out what the horses like and not to interfere too much with that, because you’re not going to change a horse in 20 minutes.”

Mental challenge

Horsemanship added in together with four other sports. I remember once at Badminton a Corkman surveying one of the iconic cross-country fences and remarking “Arra, I’ve jumped a bigger fence out hunting!” The appeal for eventing fans is the overall challenge of stringing together a good dressage test and conjuring up clear cross-country and show jumping rounds. Just as it is for pentathlon fans.

This variety appeals most to Sive too. “I love the running. I like the mental challenge of the others and the balance of having five different sports. Like in a day of training, you’d have three or four sessions and one of them will stand out as a session that went really well and then another day it will be another sport that went well.

“I think it was more a season, rather than a particular competition, that I started to feel it was all falling into place and that would have been 2018, because I made all the finals at all the World Cups I went to and that was kind of unprecedented for me,” she responded about her best result to date.

“I had top-15 finishes at all those competitions so that was a big step up and then that summer our team came second at the European championships, so that was a highlight. And from then on I’ve been able to reproduce those top-15 results so I’m hoping next year, and especially with the extra time now, I can push on from there and would love to be knocking on the doors for medals.”

Sive’s teammates at those 2018 ECMP European Championships, held in Székesfehérvár, were Natalya Coyle and Eilidh Prise, one place on the podium between host country Hungary and ironically, the bronze medal winners France, Brassil’s former training ground.

Natalya, featured alongside her partner Arthur Lanigan O’Keeffe in this paper in May, has already qualified for her prospective third Olympics and Sive went to Rio as the training partner to the Meath pentathlete, who finished sixth there four years ago.

Sive Brassil congratulates Natalya Coyle after she finished sixth at the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil \ Ramsey Cardy/Sportsfile

“It [Rio] was a really cool experience. I spent most of my time at the holding camp for athletes preparing for competition, who hadn’t gone out to the Games yet. That was in a different part of Brazil and because the pentathlon is so near the end of the Olympics, I only really got to see the Pentathlon.

“It was great for me to get to see how it all happens and the structure of the day, the stands and the crowds and how it just sits different to the rest of the competitions.

“Hopefully now, if I get to go next year, I won’t be totally overwhelmed by the occasion.”

The Tokyo trail

Sive was on track for that second qualifying place for the women’s pentathlon at Tokyo. And then the pandemic struck, which saw her return home and try to keep up her training regime in her parents’ back garden.

“It was a stressful time for me earlier on in the year when everything was up in the air due to Covid. I wasn’t sure if the Olympics would go ahead or if I would be able to travel to the remaining qualifying competitions. Once the decision had been made to postpone the Olympics to 2021, I was relieved because at least now there was a timeline to work towards again and I knew I would have the chance to qualify next year.

“It has been tough over the past few months not getting to compete but I’ve made the most of this time, spending time at home with my family and also training hard.”

Having three family members – Michael, Colm and Maeve - working as doctors on the front line in Irish and Australian hospitals during the pandemic has no doubt shaped her perspective.

“My family and the people I know, touch wood, have been extremely fortunate.

“I don’t know anyone who has been sick or lost anyone and that’s enough to be perfectly happy and grateful for, because it’s been a really difficult time for a lot of people.

“Mary lives in Canada and Michael has actually just moved to Toronto with his family. Colm lives in Perth in Western Australia and then Maeve lives in Galway now, she had finished up work in Melbourne and came back. I live in Dublin so we’re the only two in Ireland now.”

Had 2020 gone according to plan, there would have been the prospect of a Brassil family reunion in Japan.

“My parents, my boyfriend, Marc Walsh, and some of my siblings were hoping to travel out as well so hopefully that will all still be able to go ahead next year.”

If 2021 goes according to plan, Sive will have qualified for Tokyo (July 23rd – August 8th) and be counting down to the final day of the Games when the pentathlon takes place.

“The route that I’m trying to qualify through is world rankings and that will be known at the end of the competition season when they publish the rankings. And so we still had three World Cup events, a World Cup final and a World championships left to do [before Covid-19].

“We will still have those left to do in a very short space of time next year from the end of March until the end of May, early June, so it will be a very small window. Three of your top results will go towards your world ranking and so far I’ve only got the chance to compete at two world ranking competitions, so I’ll hopefully get a strong third result.

“I’m looking forward to seeing how all the hard work will pay off in competition next year. I have no competitions until March 2021, so although it’s a long time to wait, I’m going to make the most of the extra time to get better and stronger across all five events.”

Mind games

There’s no dwelling on what might have been though in her psyche. “The pentathlon is on the very last day of the Games so I’d certainly be at my Olympic training camp already. I haven’t been torturing myself too much!"

“I’ve found there’s been a comfort in the universal nature of it all. We’re all on hold, things are on hold and I don’t think I’m missing out on the would-be Olympics. It just hasn’t happened. So I don’t get caught up in what might have been because I’m looking forward to next year.

“Funding-wise, as a carded athlete, I’ve been very fortunate to have my funding remain in place throughout the pandemic. It has been a huge help to me.

“I have also been fortunate enough to be able to use all the excellent facilities on the National Sports Campus for the last number of weeks since the lockdown was lifted,” said Sive, who slotted this phone interview in between training.

“I’m on a recovery week this week. You train very hard for three or four weeks and then have a bit of a down week to regenerate, so I only had two training sessions today, two sessions in the Sports Institute and then after that a swim in the National Aquatic Centre. I live about a 10-minute drive from the training.”

She, Natalya and another dual Olympian Arthur Lanigan O’Keeffe all follow this rigorous training programme. “Arthur is actually very involved in our training as he has been our swimming coach for the last two years! If everything goes to plan next year, it will be exciting to compete alongside them in Tokyo.”

For the show jumping phase, there’s another Olympian coach at hand. “We’ve been really lucky at the last two Olympics and then last year, before Covid happened, we had John Ledingham with us at competitions helping us with the show jumping element, so you knew you were in safe hands.

“All of our riding lessons are done in Broadmeadows Equestrian Centre with Brian Duff and he’s excellent too. For travelling to competitions, we have John,” she added about the Seoul Olympics competitor.

On the map

Has anyone from Ballinasloe competed at the Olympic Games? “I don’t think so? My own coach Martina McCarthy is from Athenry and she went to the Sydney Olympics so it kind of comes back to the west,” Sive said about Pentathlon Ireland’s Performance Director. “I’d certainly love to put Ballinasloe on the map.”

‘Sweet’ and ‘goodness’ came up in the Google search for the meaning of her name. Although apt for this articulate Olympic hopeful, this turns out to be the wrong lead. “I think the reason my parents picked it was the Town Hall Theatre had a production of ‘Sive’ on around the time I was born.”

This time next year may well see Sive Brassil on the centre stage in Tokyo.