SPORTSWOMAN OF THE MONTHWHILE SEVERAL of our former Sportswomen of the Month, among them Katie Taylor (boxing) and Madeline Perry (squash), must be running out of patience awaiting the green light from the International Olympic Committee for the inclusion of their particular sporting disciplines, there's an added sense of frustration for another of our leading athletes, the rower Sinéad Jennings, as she keeps an eye on events in Beijing.
The 31-year-old Donegal woman has the misfortune to excel at a non-Olympic rowing discipline, the lightweight single scull, never - despite having teamed up with a number of partners - making the breakthrough in the double scull, which is an Olympic discipline.
Jennings had hoped to make it to Beijing in the heavyweight scull but the Ireland head coach, Harald Jahrling, refused to sanction her entry for the Olympic Qualifier and there ended her hopes.
She insists, though, that there's no bitterness as she watches the Olympics from home.
"I'm enjoying watching it," she says. "I'd been through that whole sense of disappointment already.
"I wasn't given the support I needed back in May to get into the heavyweight sculls so that was a hard time. But I didn't want to lose energy thinking about it; I just tried to put it out of my head. I realised a long time ago I wasn't going to get there."
Jennings came to prominence back in 2000 when she took bronze at the World Championships, winning gold a year later in Lucerne. Last month she completed her collection of medals when she took silver at the World Championships in Austria, Switzerland's Pamela Weisshaupt pipping her to gold by just 55-hundredths of a second.
"I was really disappointed at first - I thought I had it," she said at the time. "But when I looked up at the Tricolour going up at the medal ceremony, I thought, 'It's not often you see that.' So I'm delighted to have got a medal."
Still no regrets yesterday?
"Yeah, I was a tiny bit disappointed but I couldn't have done any more," she said.
After a poor start in the final Jennings battled back to take the lead with 500 metres to go, only to be overtaken by Weisshaupt at the death. The performance, though, completed a successful four weeks for the final-year pharmacy student at Trinity College; who took silver in the lightweight single sculls at the World Cup in Poland.
Her success in Austria, though, even if it was in the absence of those who had qualified for the Olympics, raised the spirits.
"There go any thoughts of retirement," she said immediately after the race, "I'll have to come back again next year and win."
Now? "I'm a little bit torn. My finals are in September so that makes it difficult, but you'd never know - it's hard to give up."
The Letterkenny native, who as a teenager represented Ireland at triathlon, is a former winner in our Sportswoman awards, taking the June honour in 2006 when she teamed up with Niamh Ní Chéilleachair in the lightweight double to win the first ever medal for Ireland in a women's Olympic-class event when they took bronze at the World Cup in Poland.
