February 16, 2011
By Staff Reporter
By Harry Keaney
New York native Deirdre Murphy is on her bike, in pursuit of Olympic gold — for Ireland.
On Sept. 26, the 41-year-old cyclist will be power-pedaling 80 miles through Sydney’s Centennial and Queen’s Parks, competing against the best in the world. That in itself will earn her a unique distinction: She will be the first female cyclist to represent Ireland in the Olympics.
But if Murphy’s determination is any indication, she’s also sure to cycle her heart out to earn Ireland a spot on the coveted winner’s podium.
Although she was a latecomer to professional cycling at age 33, she has, in the last nine years, accumulated 79 race victories. She is also a two-time world master’s champion and a seven-time world masters medalist. She has also won three gold medals on the track at the Nike Masters World Games in 1998 in Portland, Ore.
But, of course, dry statistics do not tell the full story, one that goes back to 1992, when Murphy was enjoying a successful Wall Street career as a debt and bank loan trader. She took up cycling, merely as a diversion to the stressful pace of the trading floor.
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"Each day I’d cycle from my lower Fifth Avenue apartment for pre-dawn training in Central Park," she said.
She’s a regular visitor to Ireland, too, where she could be found flying along the windy roads that meander through the scenic Burren in County Clare, around where her father, Daniel, lives, in the village of Corofin, for part of the year.
The cycling bug had bitten.
Soon, she began competing in races and by 1995 she had won gold medals at New York’s Empire Games.
"My dad quipped that if I could beat the taxis through Central Park, I could beat the Italians in the Alps. He was joking, but I was dead serious. I already had my sights set on the 1996 World Masters Championships in the Tyrolean Alps," she said.
When Murphy won the silver medal in the women’s division of the World Masters, she decided to dedicate herself to professional cycling. It was a decision with huge consequences, one that only a person with an Olympic-sized passion could rationalize.
"As I knew this would constitute a full-time effort, I gave up my lucrative job and started my own interior-decorating business to find the necessary time for training and competition," she said. "I slashed my budget drastically and concentrated on cycling."
In 1977, she won the gold medal in the World Masters. "By then I was a member of the Irish National Cycling team and had set the 2000 Olympics as my ultimate goal," she said.
To finance that effort, Murphy sold her apartment and rented a small fifth-floor walk-up.
In her competitive quest to reach Sydney, she cleared the final hurdle last November in Uruguay, where she finished fourth in the B World Championships, thus qualifying Ireland, for the first time ever, to send a female cyclist to the Olympics.
Although she spends hours cycling alone, the centerpiece of her training has been a non-stop competitive schedule that began last May and runs straight through the end of this month. This included a finish at the HP Laserjet Women’s Challenge, an 11-day, 625-mile stage race considered the toughest race in the world for women.
Apart from her efforts on the bike, there’s also another more mundane battle that Murphy must constantly wage.
"Funding from the Irish Cycling Federation is limited to Sydney expenses alone, I even had to pay my own airfare to Uruguay to qualify Ireland for Sydney," she said. "My full-time competition and training schedule have forced me to put my decorating business on the back burner and with that reduced income I have begun to amass uncomfortable levels of personal debt."
Because of this, she is appealing to individuals and corporate sponsors to help her.
"Although I am proud of my independent spirit, I am also a realist," she said.
But her enthusiasm is also infectious.
"Come to Sydney and ‘we’ll chant a soldier’s song,’ " she declared.