Sanita Puspure's return from the sporting brink was one of the great sporting stories of 2022.
Ireland's double world gold medal winning champion admits she was "heartbroken" after Tokyo last year, after all that painstaking work that went into qualifying for a third Games failed to yield a first Olympic medal for her.
She considered retiring in the aftermath. Instead, she bounced back by changing tack and winning World bronze with Zoe Hyde in the women's double sculls in September.
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The prospect of a fourth Olympics, with Paris 2024 coming ever closer, is a live prospect. Qualifying gets underway in the summer.
"It's fun," Puspure smiled. "I'm really, really enjoying it."
"It's different, it's someone to talk to, you don't feel lonely anymore and if you go through a miserable session together it's a little bit easier to be miserable together in the boat rather than to be alone.
"We had absolutely no expectations on performances because I was out injured for half a year, I wasn't rowing for a long time and didn't even know what I was going to do.
"We just kind of jumped in and did well, enjoyed it. So we'll see.
"I feel recovered now. I took last year quite easy, it was a transition year because I didn't know if I was going to stick to it.
"Because I was heartbroken, I found it easier to stick to what I knew so I trained a little bit and I feel that helped me to get better and once I started working, mentally I felt much better as well.
"Look, I'm at the stage where I'm still physically doing good, mentally I'm doing better now than I did last year so I'm taking it one step at a time.
"I'm enjoying my new journey now in the double, it's very fresh and very new, a different challenge and yeah, time will tell."
In Tokyo, the spotlight dazzled elsewhere as Irish rowing's Olympic success spread wings, its glare falling on gold medallists Paul O'Donovan and Fintan McCarthy, and on the women's foursomes, who earned silver.
And Puspure? She knew from that she was playing catch-up after a year filled with injury and illness, with family bereavement. But she ploughed on, hoping that things would turn once she got going on the Sea Forest Waterway.
Everything fell apart even before her disappointing finish in the semi-final.
"It really did, yeah," said Puspure, who turned 40 earlier this month. "Even when I won the quarter-final heat I knew I wasn't myself and that wasn't the way I race.
"I knew something was wrong but then looking at the whole year back, I think I was very naive hoping that I was going to be able to pull it off.
"It's the athlete's nature to keep denying all the things that happened, still hoping for the best. Now looking back I clearly see it was very silly of me to think that it would be all right.
"I didn't have a good winter's training behind me, I was ill most of the time and maybe I just worked too hard in the years beforehand and paid the price later.
"I don't know. We're still getting to the bottom of it, to be honest. After Covid it all went...it was a shambles. It went pear shaped.
"I had an awful year with illnesses and injuries. I was just in a very, very deep hole that I couldn't get out of."
She came home to Cork and to her family. What followed was a long period of reflection. Retirement was discussed.
Taking a part-time paid job as a UCC Rowing coach helped restore some of the love of the sport that was lost.
"It's been interesting," she said. "Lots of thinking, trying to decide what to do.
"My kids are at the age where they ask questions about what happened and what went wrong - and winning the Worlds twice in a row probably didn't help because there was a big expectation.
"I had expectations of myself and I suppose everybody did, but just everything that could go wrong went wrong.
"But I'm still here. I'm very lucky to have the support of my boss and my colleagues to be able to row at the same time as coaching.
"I'm still dealing with bits of it. I was a shambles when I came home, obviously.
"When you give sport so much of your time and your life and you focus on it so much, and something doesn't quite work out the way you think it's going to, it really crushes you.
"It hits you hard and obviously it takes time to get over and takes time to find reasons why it went wrong. I'm still looking at it and figuring it out."
Given that perspective, Puspure was eager to give back.
She is a member of the Olympic Federation of Ireland's Athletes' Commission and has participated in the launch of their 'Enjoying the Journey' strategy and new mentoring programme.
For the Cork-based rower, the strategy means a lot on a personal level.
"If I'd have focused more on not the end result of the Olympics but the journey I might have been a bit less crushed, and this is what we want to pass on to the next generation," she stressed.
"It's important not just to focus on what you want to get out of it, but how you're going to get there and what you're going to do along the way."
Athlete welfare is also something she is passionate about.
"My career is quite long and I loved it because I could deal with a lot over such a long time," said Puspure. "But if you want to start a family or buy a house, you have to think about whether you're going to work.
"It's something we want to push into a tax incentive or something like that so athletes can apply for mortgages, because it made it really difficult for us.
"As a family it was difficult, but then as an athlete you want to take care of those things and not wait. I'm 40 now and to think about it now would be too late, I wouldn't get a mortgage.
"It would help promote the longevity of an athlete's career as well."
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