“It’s a natural human instinct, especially as an athlete, that you don’t want to lose,” Peter O’Mahony says on a quiet evening in Dublin as a new rugby season looms over us. “But at times it got in my way and caused despair. I honestly don’t know where that deep-down hatred came from but it used to derail me at times.”
The former captain of Munster, Ireland and the Lions is settling into his second year of retirement and the taciturn grit and uncompromising commitment which defined his career have been replaced by more complex reflections. O’Mahony is a fascinating character and I ask whether he would have carried the same competitive zeal if he had been a wizard at, for example, chess or mathematics.
