No, Long felt that there was a better way. For everyone in the Irish system. “We have the tools to be able to have better results across the board,” she says now. “So I am motivated by trying this again and seeing if we can get people to have more fulfilling experiences and the results will follow. That’s why I’m here again.” That’s a serious statement. Rowing has, after all, been Ireland’s most successful sport across the last three Games with five of the country’s 13 medals. Whatever about doing things ‘better’, it will be very different when the 2025 European Championship launches in Plovdiv this week. Ten Irish boats will commit to the water, not one with a crew that featured in France. Long switches from the four to this country’s first ever female quad, Paul O’Donovan is on medical duties, and only Fiona Murtagh is there from the quartet that won bronze in Tokyo. Lightweight rowing, Ireland’s strength, is a relic of the past. Antonio Maurogiovanni, the high-performance director who delivered four Olympic medals and eleven World Championship podium places during his time in Ireland, is now with France. The majority of the coaches Maurogiovanni gathered around him have moved on too and Rowing Ireland is still in the process of identifying a successor to the Italian whose old-school methods brought success and split opinions. Long was one who struggled under his management. “I experienced Antonio’s programme from not succeeding in it for the Tokyo cycle. I really did try to tick all the boxes and never really felt like I fit in the system, even though I rowed full-time and used all of my savings, every penny I had. “I never got any support from Rowing Ireland financially to be able to do that and it spat me out the other side. I was really injured and maybe I would have gone to Tokyo as a spare if I hadn’t gotten injured. “Then I went back again to that system, rewired my brain as to how to succeed in it and had to realise that I have to fund myself because the system doesn’t reward me until I get results and then try to work the system that way.” Long gets that there are people who thrive in the ‘blood, sweat and tears’ environment but she is adamant there is another way. A better, more inclusive and more successful, way. By way of proof she offers up Fintan McCarthy. McCarthy, she says, is the type of athlete who “thrives off the community”. He has two Olympic gold medals and a host of other World and European titles alongside O’Donovan to disprove the theory that nice guys finish last. “You don’t have to step on necks to get gold,” she says, “and he has done it twice now.” This opens a fascinating and elemental debate. Elite sport is its own filter, a dog-eat-dog world where the fittest survive, but Long’s take is that more again can make it by providing a programme with a more collective and caring culture. “Some people come out of the Olympics really hurt, they have a bad experience because they didn’t get those things, the medal, and they didn’t have the community around them. Just mental health afterwards is a bit of a quagmire. “So my hope going forward is that we can shape Rowing Ireland in a way that you are part a community. [That] Rowing Ireland doesn’t use you to get a result. You build a team, a community. There is so much more that we have to offer.” Community is a theme that resonates with her. Born in South Africa, Long emigrated to Cobh with her father when she was just 16. Her dad had been blinded in a conflict known, depending on your take, as the Rhodesian Bush War or the Zimbabwean War of Independence. Ireland offered a better quality of life for the disabled and his parents Eileen and Graham had hailed from Bishopstown before emigrating to southeast Africa where she trained horses and he got involved in the mining business. It was only when their granddaughter moved from Ireland to London for university that an old fondness for sport was rekindled by a new love: rowing. And it was through this new passion that Long found her tribe when she returned to Cork after eight years. Lee Valley Rowing Club was little more than “a tent beside the water” but it offered a place for everyone and anyone. It was Noel Monahan, a club stalwart who had once wore a green singlet, who first convinced Long, now 35, that the Olympics was doable. When she looks at the Irish rowing scene she sees something special, unique. Her time in London taught her that you probably needed to be in a posh school to get a good foundation in the sport in the UK. Ireland wasn’t like that. Her mum lives in Glandore now, and her own debut regatta on Irish soil was down the road in Skib, so she has experienced how grounded and accessible the sport is here, how there is a lake or a river within touching distance for anyone who wants to hold an oar. Long looks around the team base in Ovens in Cork and sees men and women, Olympians and Paralympians. She sees a sporting programme and a cross-section of society, and she already sees signs of a focus on fostering more of a community feel. Dominic Casey, the coaching mastermind from Skibbereen, has been made interim head coach and Long describes a man who aims to empower, and who trusts, athletes who still have to produce the goods at trials and at championships. A new strategic plan has instigated significant changes in the high-performance structure. Among them is the appointment for the first time of a high-performance wellness officer. Other roles will zero in on performance delivery and talent development. Long and McCarthy have been part of the selection process for the new high-performance director. They are looking for a candidate who is going to inspire cultural change, not a day-to-day taskmaster to dictate to a programme replete with Olympic experience and success. There has already been a team-building day held in the spring that brought the elite athletes and Rowing Ireland staff together. The idea is that those people in admin will be as invested in the Europeans and Worlds and Olympics as the high-performance branch. A huge fan of the Springbok rugby team, Long has seen how they have embraced the nation as a whole on the journey to winning two World Cups, how the team physio seems to get as much of a kick out of it all as the captain Siya Kolisi. That’s the spirit she sees in clubs and one she feels Ireland’s rower can harness on the water. “Every club just makes it work. I feel like that is a superpower that Ireland has in rowing and we haven’t really tapped into it. I am hoping for this cycle that this is the thing we tap into going to LA. It is about all of us getting something from it. “If you succeed and I don’t then that doesn’t mean I didn’t get something out of it. It means that the whole community has been elevated. Or at least that’s where I hope we are going with it with the new strategy we have.”