ARTIST: Ireland's Emma Slevin will be aiming high at the European Championships in Munich. Pic: Thomas Schreyer, Sportsfile

Rowing has Skibbereen, almost two-thirds of Ireland’s Olympic boxing podiums took their first step in Belfast, while Kerry and Kilkenny have been able to mint All-Ireland medals at a rate that could spawn a second industrial revolution.

Clusters of elite athletes are nothing new in Irish or global sport, but they aren’t two a penny either. Among the more recent is the conveyor belt that has produced four gymnasts for the Irish artistic women’s team that competes this week in Munich.

Emma Slevin, Blathnaid Higgins and Kate Molloy are all poised to represent their Renmore club, Galway and Ireland at the European Championships in the city’s Olimpiahalle, starting on Thursday. Jane Heffernan is down as a reserve.

The other two members of the senior women’s team are Emily Moorhead from the Salto club in Lisburn and Halle Hilton, an Ipswich-born athlete who had been competing for Great Britain before making the switch over recently.

All of which begs the obvious question: why Renmore? And why now?

“It’s mainly just down to coaching and the facilities that we have in Galway,” said Slevin. “Our coach decided many, many years ago, when we were just little things, eight years of age, that she wanted to bring a team to Europeans back in 2018.

“She recruited a good few of us, she worked with us from an early age, and we were all in it together. We could all push each other on and pick each other up when we were down. It created a really nice team there. For all of us to be here now is great.” 

Sally Batley is the coach at the top of a pyramid in Renmore which now boasts over a thousand members. She is also one of half-a-dozen coaches travelling with an Irish team which, between juniors and seniors and both sexes, numbers 17 in Germany.

The men’s senior squad, which will compete in the same venue a week later, will be led by 2020 Olympian Rhys McClenaghan who is coming off the back of the silver medal won at the recent Commonwealth Games in Birmingham.

McClenaghan will be joined by two other Commonwealth colleagues in Ewan McAteer, who finished sixth in the final of the vault for Northern Ireland, and Eamon Montgomery, who registered a fifth place standing on floor.

Dominick Cunningham and Daniel Fox are the others.

That Irish gymnastics is on the way up is obvious, not least after Slevin’s historic season in 2021 when she became the first competitor from these shores to reach the finals of the All-Around discipline at both the European and the World Championships.

Renmore wasn’t the only foundation stone in that.

Her parents brought a background in hurling and camogie with them when they migrated westwards from Kilkenny, twin sister Kate has represented Ireland underage at soccer and Galway at Gaelic football, while brother Mark has had some success at hurling.

There’s clearly something in the water there.

The gymnast in the family ships up to Munich now with the Leaving Cert only just behind her and a place studying science hopefully to come in either Galway or Dublin, depending on the points she earns and those required through the CAO.

That aside, there is Munich and another World Championships in October to consider. Both will be stiffer tests than in 2021 when the Europeans were used by many as a springboard for Tokyo and the Worlds suffered somewhat in the wake of the Olympics.

The exams weren’t as “bad” as she might have expected but they did take their toll with Slevin needing some time to readjust to the task at hand in the gym. That said, she has made the trip confident that she’s in a good place.

This isn’t her first rodeo, after all, and not everyone on the squad can say as much.

Still only 19, she has been flying in and out of Ireland for competitions for six years now – Covid’s complications excepted – and she has learned to tame and even tailor the pre-event nerves to her own benefit by now.

“A change of focus definitely helped me. A focus on what was in my control at the time, which was just how I react to situations. If I’m getting stressed out, that I don’t waste the whole training sessions on it.

“It’s easier said than done. It does take practise and that definitely helped me to a good performance. As well as that, just in terms of competition, having a pre-performance routine helped me set my mind. ‘This is it, this is routine’. It eased my mind to think that I had done this so many times before.”

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