HAYES Carolyn

General
TOKYO FOCUS
In January 2020 she decided to take a break from medicine to focus on her health and try and secure her place at the Olympic Games in Tokyo. After the Games were rescheduled to 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, she remained away from her profession before returning to a role as a clinical tutor and student support officer in anaesthesiology at University of Limerick, Ireland, in August 2020. "It has been incredibly difficult to stay away from the hospital environment during [the pandemic], I am a doctor first and foremost. Every cell in my body was screaming at me to go and help. It has been particularly difficult watching my colleagues and friends working on the frontline and having to cope with so much stress and loss of innocent life. Elite level sport is a choice and one I happily made and I feel fortunate that I have always been encouraged to pursue my goals and dreams. I have an incredible bunch of people behind me who go out of their way to make things happen for me. All I want is to go to the Olympics. Every day I get up I'm thinking of that." (rte.ie, 21 May 2021; ulaa.ul.ie, 23 Oct 2020; LinkedIn profile, 01 Aug 2020)

SWIMMING STRENGTH
She considers swimming to be her strongest discipline due to her background in the sport from a young age. "I came from a swimming background. Swimming was always my primary sport growing up so I'm strong in the water. I would have competed internationally with Ireland, but when I got to [age] 17 or 18 I found my competing declined when I went to college. I was looking for something to fill the gap so I took up water polo, which I loved. But I needed something more, a personal challenge, not just a team sport. So I started running, marathons. I was turning in three-hour marathon times without any real training or experience. Triathlon seemed to offer me more of what I wanted, it took in my swimming, the running which it seemed I was good at and there was the new element of the bike. That was completely new to me. I did my first triathlon in college, completely off the cuff. I didn't even have a bike to ride. I had to borrow one from a friend on my course. It wasn't even a real road bike - more of a hybrid, is that what they're called? And I won, by about ten minutes." (offtheball.com, 05 Jun 2019; planetx.co.uk, 16 Jan 2015)

FURTHER EDUCATION
After she graduated with a bachelor's degree in physiology from Trinity College Dublin in 2011, she studied a bachelor's degree in medicine and surgery at the University of Limerick between 2013 and 2017. (LinkedIn profile, 01 Aug 2020)