Irish sailors ambitious to add to Olympic medal haul

Preparations for the 2024 Olympics are well underway over a year out from the competition, even if Ireland's boats still have to be qualified.

With the first tickets to Marseille - where the Paris Games' sailing competitions will happen - up for grabs in The Hague in August, securing a spot is at the forefront of everyone's minds.

2004 Olympian Rory Fitzpatrick, now Irish Sailing's Head Coach, jokes that they've the 'cheapest HQ for any sporting body in Ireland,' but their three container unit set up, directly behind the Commissioners of Irish Lights in Dun Laoghaire, is critical to their future ambitions.

Before they moved into the entirely self-funded €300,000 facility in May 2019 they were depending on different clubs to help them out, but now they're bringing all of their sailors together in one space.

Summer qualification for @Paris2024 looms for our sailing hopefuls and a number of Irish boats were out on Dublin Bay @IrelandSailing #rtesport pic.twitter.com/TKo5NAbKoS

"We've great clubs to sail out of, and our team are all from different clubs, but it was extremely hard to coordinate our people, our equipment, our training in different spaces," Fitzpatrick explains.

"We operated like satelites, whereas now we can operate in unison and help each other to learn and develop more. It wasn't as easy to go sailing as it is now.

"A club is a club; it's a member space. We would be members but we have to respect their space as well. We need to have a gym, we need to have dedicated analysis space, we need our "lessons learned" unit for coming back from peark events and learning how to plan out and adapt again.

"It's cheap because they're mobile units, containers. There's three there; the body, mind and equipment. They're in a