Budapest, 15 August 2010 – The European Swimming Championships comes to a close today, and the Irish team’s tally is significantly better than it has been in recent years; 1 sliver medal, 4 National records, 4 finalists and 3 semi-finalists. The Irish swimming community, and indeed the greater sporting circle in Ireland have enjoyed a fabulous week of Irish swimming in Hungary. And although not every single team member will have achieved all of their goals, they will all take away valuable learning from this week-long competition, and of course be inspired immensley by their silver-medal winning teammate, Grainne Murphy.
17-year old school-goer Grainne Murphy yesterday claimed the first Irish medal for swimming at a European Championships in 13 years. And Murphy is also the only woman behind Michelle Smith deBruin to ever achieve this magnificent accolade. Murphy made history in the pool and made people sit up and take note of what this era of Irish swimmers is capable of.
“The phenomenal thing about Grainne’s performances is that a lot of the times we get athletes who go to the Junior level and they do well there – Grainne was no exception, she won three golds and a bronze last year at the Juniors in
“Maybe she was a little better than we even thought she was going to be. But I was watching her in training camp over the last two weeks and I’ve coached distance swimmers in the past and Grainne was certainly doing things that were very phenomenal in the training pool, so I was glad to see that they transferred over into the competition pool,” added Banks.
Before this week,
“Our goal has always been to have 6 Olympic ‘A’ qualifiers and to have a finalist and we still continue to work towards that goal, we’re not going to change that goal,” stated Banks. “Grainne is starting to lay the groundwork with other swimmers that we have here at the Europeans as well, and it’s been a great week for Irish swimming and she has certainly capped it all by winning a silver medal,” he added.
Grainne Murphy arrives back to
