Chance circumstances gave Aisling Keller an introduction to sailing. Fast forward a decade and the 2020 Olympic Games are on her horizon.
Recounting why she decided to spend countless hours out on the open water, Aisling Keller insists that it was something that was never calculated.
“I think I started when I was about ten or eleven. Sailing is not in my family at all: my parents didn’t sail or anything so it was just pure luck”, she tells me over the phone.
Yet this past July, at the Laser Radial World Championships in Japan, Keller’s 46th place finish in the final series secured a berth for Ireland at next year’s Olympic Games in Tokyo. Not bad for someone who stumbled upon the sport.
Keller’s primary school principal was a sailing enthusiast. It was his after-school sailing programme that kindled Keller’s passion for the sport.
“My older brother started first”, she says. “We went to a primary that’s close to Lough Derg Yacht Club. The principal there was a sailor and he started up sailing after school on a Wednesday each week and my brother Eoin started doing that so he caught the bug that way. Only for that, I wouldn’t be sailing at all.”
As Keller got older, her competitive instinct began to take hold: “When I was 15 or 16, that was when racing started to click with me.”
“It has always been competitive. There wouldn’t be many times that I would go out sailing for leisure – I was always doing it because I enjoyed it, but at the end of the day I was always going sailing to get better and to race better.”
Now in university, Keller finds balancing academics and sailing difficult. After dropping out of her engineering degree in University College Dublin (UCD), Trinity seemed to be a natural fit, given that the Irish sailing team train out of Dun Laoghaire.
Despite her heroics on the international stage and the prospect of an appearance at Tokyo 2020 on the horizon, Keller is frustrated by College’s treatment of her. She believes that the College needs to do more to accommodate its athletes: “I wanted to do physio, so it just worked out to go to Trinity. In hindsight, maybe UCD could have been better just because they are better with sport.”
Keller tried to do half a college term year last year and was ultimately unsuccessful in trying to balance the rigorous training and preparation of an Olympic cycle with college life. Keller became disillusioned by Trinity’s tedious bureaucracy and felt that the College was not doing its best to help her.
“Last year trying to do a half year was really difficult. I would have been the first person ever in physio trying to split a year and [Trinity] just didn’t know how to accommodate me or didn’t want to – I’m really not sure which.”
“It’s just basically the process I went through was going through my tutor and then she would contact whoever higher up that I was trying to get in contact with and the process just wasn’t very effective.”
“I think Trinity is so focused on academics that sports is taking a back seat… I think Trinity could work on their flexibility with student athletes.”
Now taking a year out, she will enter as a second-year next September. For now, she turns her attention to the Olympics. With Keller securing a berth for Ireland, her focus now will be securing individual qualification.
Explaining the mind-boggling qualification process, Keller says that “other people hearing it are really taken aback, but I’ve known for years that this is the process – you have to qualify the boat and then qualify yourself. This was a part of the journey and had to be done, without it nobody can go to the Olympics”.
The spot secured by Keller will be filled by her, or former Trinity sports scholar Aoife Hopkins, a friend, teammate and now rival of Keller’s.
“We’re pretty good friends. We’re teammates. In sailing it’s very beneficial to train with other boats to test speed. You don’t improve if you’re not training against other boats.”
“With me and Aoife, if we didn’t have each other we probably wouldn’t have qualified the country at all, so we do need each other and we use each other to improve ourselves, and the campaign would be very lonely if we were out by ourselves”
When I ask whether Hopkins encountered similar problems to Keller in dealing with Trinity’s treatment of her struggle to balance sport and college she replies: “Yeah, she has – she’s actually moved to UCD now.”
Hopkins and Keller will have to park their friendship when the Irish Olympic Trial Series comes around in March. They will take part in two regatta events – one in Hyeres, along with the Regal Princess Sophia Regatta in Panama. Both events entail ten races over five days. Whoever secures the highest-ranking over the two events will represent Ireland in Tokyo.
“I’m really good friends with girls from other countries as well but when you’re on the water you can’t think of people as your friends: they are your competitors. These are some of the hard things about sport but you can’t avoid it.”
Once all friendships are momentarily cast aside, Keller is confident that she will be the one sailing in Tokyo.
“My aim for the trials will be to sail my own race, and, at the end of the day, the better sailor will win. We’ve been fairly neck and neck over the last three years, and I think if I do what’s best for me this coming winter training, and coming up to the regatta, I’m confident that I can do it.”
In many ways, participation at next summer’s games will come to define Keller’s career thus far: “The whole point of me taking time out of college and training full time is to go to the Olympics – that is the ultimate goal and I’ll be hugely disappointed if I don’t make it.”
Coming to the end of our phone call, I ask her what it would mean to represent Ireland in the Olympics. Hesitating, she reaches for words to faithfully articulate how she would feel.
“I’ve put so much into it – so many sacrifices, the hours on the water and the thing with being an athlete is that it is 24/7. Once you finish training you’re trying to recover for the next one as soon as you can.”
“It’s nine-to-five, it’s every hour of your life – you’re thinking what can I do now to make myself a better athlete? So the build-up for this has really been years long, so to do it for myself and my family and everyone that’s supporting me in Tipperary and in Dublin and everywhere, it would be unreal.”
“I don’t even know how to answer that question.”
For now, Keller will focus on securing that all-important Olympic qualification, and, perhaps in 12 months time, she will be better placed to answer.
