Philip Doyle and Daire Lynch have taken different paths towards the Olympic podium, but their stories are now eternally intertwined after they won double sculls bronze on the waters of Vaires-sur-Marnes.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, Banbridge native Doyle was a trainee doctor working on the general medical ward at Daisy Hill Hospital in Newry.
At that time he was partnered with Ronan Byrne, with whom he won won silver at the 2019 World Championships.
Doyle went through gruelling solo training sessions around shifts that flipped between days and nights over the course of a winter where the hospital was creaking under the pressure of another Covid-19 wave.
He knows what it means to graft.
The 31-year-old's rowing journey began back in 2014. Doyle was working part-time in a clothes shop where he met a guy who rowed for UCD. Doyle was urged to pick up the oars and give it a try. He did and never looked back.
He made his international debut in 2018 at World Rowing Cup III in the men's single sculls, and ever since he's been a fixture in Ireland's double sculls crew, winning that World silver with Byrne before they came 10th overall at the Tokyo Games.
Doyle teamed up with Lynch in 2023, and it was quickly obvious that it was a potent match.
They were fourth at the Europeans and then claimed bronze at the Worlds. That result qualified the boat for Paris, and they continued to build momentum, winning gold at a World Cup regatta in June. They never dared proclaim it, but a medal in Paris was always in their sights.
Lynch is five years younger than Doyle.
This is the Clonmel man's Olympic debut, but his talent has also been clear for years.
After being bitten by the rowing bug, Lynch displayed a phenomenal appetite for practice to mark himself out as a rising star. At the 2016 World Junior championships, he finished eighth alongside Byrne.
He attended Yale University on a scholarship from 2017-2022 where he studied economics. Lynch was also under the watchful eye of renowned coach coach Steve Gladstone at Yale, and continued to make impressive strides forward.
In October 2020, he partnered Byrne at the Europeans in Poland and won a bronze medal. The following August he won a scorching hot National Championship single sculls final, beating Paul and Gary O'Donovan, as well as Fintan and Jake McCarthy, to the title.
"That racing out there showed the strength across all the clubs across Ireland," Paul O'Donovan said afterwards. "People say it's only the Skibbereen boys that are doing well, but we can see that there's a lot more now that have bought into this hard training lark."
How right he was.
Lynch and Doyle's medal was no shock; indeed on another day it may well have been a different colour.
"I went to bed last night thinking we might win the thing to be honest but to come away with an Olympic medal you can never be disappointed," Doyle said on Thursday.
"I made a little mistake there at the end, a bit of a neck injury seized up on me in the last 100 metres, but it's because we pushed the body to the limit.
"It shows that you’re at the limit and luckily we had enough work done that we could recover and then come across the line."
Lynch is the first Olympic medal winner from Co Tipperray since Nenagh's Bob Tisdall won gold in the 400m Hurdles in 1932.
He felt the full effects of what it takes to medal at a Games, admitting: "I was shook on that podium to be honest, started barfing my ring up after!
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"I thought 'can we have a minute there'. It was like, 'get the clothes on! Get the clothes on!' But it was nice up there, a bit different to the usual World Rowing ceremonies where they just throw a medal at your neck and throw you off.
"There was huge Irish support there, a load of people came from Clonmel. My mother’s family is all here, my dad’s family. It’s great to see them all here."
Into the history books they go as Ireland's first heavyweight rowing medallists at an Olympic Games.
The doctor and the economist, reaping the rewards of years of mind-bogglingly hard work.
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