What makes a champion? For many of Ireland’s top female athletes, the answer starts long before the medals, the records, or the roaring crowds. It starts with someone they looked up to, someone who showed them what was possible.
Six of Ireland’s finest sports stars, competing across athletics, boxing, football, camogie and horse racing, have opened up about the women who shaped who they are today. And the stories they tell are as compelling as anything they’ve achieved on the field.
For many of them, the inspiration hit early. Growing up in Ireland, female athletes did not always have the visibility they deserved. There were no wall-to-wall TV deals, no viral highlight reels, and in some sports, barely any coverage at all. So when a young girl did catch a glimpse of a woman competing at the highest level, it stuck.
The athletes spoke about watching women push through barriers that had no business being there in the first place. Whether it was a mother who played club sport every weekend without any fuss, an older sister who made the county panel, or a world-class performer seen briefly on the television during a major championship, those moments planted something that never went away.
Boxing has seen some of the most dramatic rises in Irish women’s sport over the past two decades. The fighters who came through that system talk about the importance of seeing women in the gym being taken seriously, being coached properly, and being given the same intensity of preparation as their male counterparts. That shift did not happen by accident. It happened because certain women demanded it and refused to accept anything less.
In athletics, Ireland has produced world-class talent across middle distance, sprinting and field events. The runners and jumpers in that group pointed to the significance of seeing Irish women compete on the global stage, not just participate, but genuinely compete for podium places. When you see someone from your own county, your own background, standing on a world championship start line, it rewires what you think is achievable.
Football and camogie carry a particular weight in Irish sporting culture. They are tied to community, to county pride, to something that goes deeper than just the game itself. Several of the athletes spoke about women in their local clubs who never got the recognition they deserved, coaches and players who gave everything to their sport long before anyone was paying attention. Those unsung figures mattered just as much as the household names.
Horse racing might seem like a different world compared to team sports or athletics, but the women who compete in it face their own version of the same story. Breaking into a sport with a long history of male dominance takes a particular kind of resilience. The female jockeys and trainers who came before, who took the knocks and kept going, created space for the next generation even when the industry was slow to recognise them.
What comes through clearly across all six stories is that inspiration is rarely just about talent. It is about character. The women these athletes look up to are not just remembered for what they won. They are remembered for how they handled setbacks, how they carried themselves under pressure, and how they treated the people around them.
There is also something important in the idea that you do not have to be a global superstar to be someone’s role model. A club player who trained three nights a week after a full day’s work, a coach who spotted potential in a quiet teenager and refused to let it go to waste, a teammate who led by example without ever making a speech about it. These are the people who quietly build the foundation that the bigger careers are built on.
Irish women’s sport has changed enormously in a short space of time. Attendances are up, media coverage has improved, and there is a growing sense that female athletes are finally getting something closer to the recognition they have always deserved. But the athletes themselves are clear that this progress did not come from nowhere. It was earned, piece by piece, by women who often got very little in return for what they gave.
The six athletes speaking out now are part of a generation that gets to stand on those shoulders. And to a woman, they seem to understand exactly how much that means.