Sport in Ireland plays an important role in Irish society. The many sports played and followed in Ireland include Gaelic games, association football, horse racing, show jumping, greyhound racing, basketball, fishing, motorsport, boxing, tennis, hockey, golf, rowing, cricket, and rugby union.
David McGowan is an Australian high-performance rowing coach and former representative rower. As a rower he was a junior world champion, competed twice at senior World Rowing Championships for Australia and raced at the Athens 2004 Summer Olympics in a coxless four. As a coach he has had head coaching roles in the national rowing programmes of The Netherlands and Ireland.
Caryn Davies is an American rower. She is the winner of the 2023 Thomas Keller Medal, the most prestigious international award in the sport of rowing, and the only American to have ever won this award. She won gold medals as the stroke seat of the U.S. women's eight at the 2012 Summer Olympics and the 2008 Summer Olympics. In April 2015 Davies stroked Oxford University to victory in the first ever women's Oxford/Cambridge boat race held on the same stretch of the river Thames in London where the men's Oxford/Cambridge race has been held since 1829. She was the most highly decorated Olympian to take part in either [men's or women's] race. In 2012 Davies was ranked number 4 in the world by the International Rowing Federation. At the 2004 Olympic Games she won a silver medal in the women's eight. Davies has won more Olympic medals than any other U.S. oarswoman. The 2008 U.S. women's eight, of which she was a part, was named FISA crew of the year. Davies is from Ithaca, New York, where she graduated from Ithaca High School, and rowed with the Cascadilla Boat Club. Davies was on the Radcliffe College (Harvard) Crew Team and was a member on Radcliffe's 2003 NCAA champion Varsity 8, and overall team champion. In 2013, she was a visiting student at Pembroke College, Oxford, where she stroked the college men's eight to a victory in both Torpids and the Oxford University Summer Eights races. In 2013–14 Davies took up Polynesian outrigger canoeing in Hawaii, winning the State novice championship and placing 4th in the long-distance race na-wahine-o-ke-kai with her team from the Outrigger Canoe Club. In 2013, she was inducted into the New York Athletic Club Hall of Fame and in 2022 into the Harvard University Athletics Hall of Fame.
Emma Kimberley Twigg is a New Zealand rower. A single sculler, she was the 2014 world champion and won gold in her fourth Olympics in Tokyo in July 2021. Previous Olympic appearances were in 2008, 2012, and 2016. She has retired from rowing twice, first for master-level studies in Europe in 2015 and then after the 2016 Olympics, disappointed at having narrowly missed an Olympic medal for the second time. After two years off the water, she started training again in 2018 and won silver at the 2019 World Rowing Championships. Since her marriage in 2020, she has become an outspoken advocate for LGBT athletes. At the 2020 Summer Olympics, Twigg won gold in the woman's single scull. At the 2024 Summer Olympics, Twigg won Silver in the same event.
Grace Elizabeth Prendergast is a former New Zealand sweep rower. She is a 15-time national champion in the premier category, an Olympic champion, a five-time world champion and the current (2022) world champion in the coxless pair. She grew up in Christchurch, where she started rowing for the Avon Rowing Club in 2007. She competed at the Tokyo Olympics in two boat classes and won gold in the coxless pair and a silver in the eight and set a new world's best time in the pair. Various parties, including the World Rowing Federation, expected her to win medals in Tokyo. She was the highest ranked female rower in the world twice in a row in 2019 and 2021. Since 2014, her rowing partner in the coxless pair has been Kerri Gowler. Prendergast is also a Boat Race winner, having competed as part of Cambridge University Boat Club's (CUBC) women's crew in 2022. She retired from professional rowing in October 2022.
Paul O'Donovan is an Irish lightweight rower. He is a double Olympic champion in the lightweight double sculls where he set a new world's best time for that event and is a seven-time world champion in single and double sculls.
Claire Molloy is an Ireland women's rugby union international from Galway. Molloy represented Ireland at the 2010, 2014 and 2017 Women's Rugby World Cups. At the 2014 tournament she was a member of the Ireland team that defeated New Zealand and she captained Ireland at the 2017 tournament. She was also a member of the Ireland teams that won the 2013 and 2015 Women's Six Nations Championships. She is also an Ireland women's rugby sevens international and captained the Ireland team at the 2013 Rugby World Cup Sevens. Molloy also played ladies' Gaelic football for Galway and featured in the 2005 All-Ireland Senior Ladies' Football Championship final.
Ruby Tew is a New Zealand Olympic rower.
Rowing Ireland, formerly the Irish Amateur Rowing Union, is the governing body of rowing for Ireland. It is a cross-border organisation administering the sport in both the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland.
Gary O'Donovan is an Irish rower. Together with his brother Paul he won the gold medal in the lightweight double sculls at the 2016 European Rowing Championships, silver in the same discipline at the 2016 Summer Olympics, and gold at the 2018 World Rowing Championships. He was the flag bearer for Ireland during the closing ceremony of the 2016 Summer Olympics.
Emily Craig is a British lightweight Olympic champion and three-time world champion rower.
Róisín Upton is an Ireland women's field hockey international. She was a member of the Ireland team that played in the 2018 Women's Hockey World Cup final. Upton was also a member of the Connecticut Huskies teams that won the 2013 and 2014 NCAA Division I Field Hockey Championships.
Rhasidat Adeleke is an Irish sprinter.
Rowan McKellar is a British rower.
Rebecca Shorten is a Northern Irish rower from Belfast. She is a world and European gold medallist and Olympic silver medallist for Great Britain.
Imogen Daisy Grant is a British lightweight world and Olympic champion rower.
Tara Rigney is an Australian representative rower. A sculler, she is a three-time Australian national champion, a two-dual world championship medallist and a 2021 Tokyo Olympian who competed in the Australian women's double-scull.
Charles Richard Jeremy Elwes is a British national representative rower. He is an Olympic and two-time world champion.
Natalie Claire Long is an Irish rower.
Ireland competed at the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris from 24 July to 11 August 2024, commemorating its centenary of the team's debut as an independent country in the same venue. Irish athletes have competed in every Summer Olympics edition of the modern era, either in its own right or as part of a Great Britain and Ireland team before 1924, except for the Berlin 1936 Olympics.
