Award-winning Howth sailors and siblings Eve and Ewan McMahon are both keen to pursue their studies while also training to qualify for the Los Angeles Olympics in 2028.
As The Sunday Independent reports, 26-year-old Ewan has opted to study engineering in UCD as an Ad Astra Elite Sports Scholar while continuing his sailing.
“This isn’t the way it usually unfolds for Irish elite sailors, but it meant Eve was also able to do both — study her international commerce course also as an Ad Astra Scholarship student — and her elite sailing,”Sinéad Kissane reports in the newspaper.
Kissane’s interview records the friendly rivalry and close-co-operation between the siblings who sailed out of Howth Yacht Club, along with 23-year-old brother Jamie, and have excelled in the ILCA dinghy class.
Eve spent December training with the British Olympic sailing team in Lanzarote before she returned home to Dublin for Christmas while Ewan missed the family celebration as he is training in Perth, Australia.
Last year, Eve McMahon became the youngest sailor ever to represent Ireland at the Olympics.
Last May she became the first Irish female sailor to win a medal at a senior world championship, taking bronze in the ILCA 6 event in China.
In June, she became the first Irish sailor to top the world rankings, and won gold at the LA Grand Slam, one of World Sailing’s four Grand Slam events, in July.
“I don’t think I’d be in the place I am today without his help,” she says of her older brother’s influence.
“I think Eve’s picked it up so quickly and that’s obviously shown through her results,” Ewan told Kissane.
“I’m getting recognised more as Eve’s brother rather than my own name. So we kind of have this sibling competition. If I beat her relatively in a regatta in terms of overalls, I say people will have to start calling Eve Ewan’s sister.”
Both siblings spent three weeks with a host family in Long Beach for the LA Grand slam – the same area of California where the LA Olympic regatta will take place.
“It’s real Champagne conditions in Los Angeles,”Eve says.
“ It was my first time ever sailing there and I love it. Somebody asked me where’s my favourite place to sail and I’m not just saying it, but it really is Los Angeles. The sailing is really technical and it’s quite tricky, but if you don’t over complicate it, you can obviously get some amazing results.”
She credits her new coach - Slovenian triple Olympic medallist Vasilij Zbogar -with her progress in 2025.
Zbogar used to coach Ewan and Finn Lynch before he switched to Eve and the women’s team.
She says that told her that “if you don’t celebrate the small achievements, you won’t be grateful for the big ones”.
“It’s not often you get to travel the world with your older brother and see such incredible things out in the water,”Eve said.
“I’m known in the fleet to have a lot of confidence and aggression in how I sail. But you always have to remember that sailing is quite humbling, and there are a lot of things that are out of your control, but I think it’s how you adapt,”she said.
Her older brother lost his funding several years ago, and didn’t qualify for the Paris Olympics as Finn Lynch competed in the ILCA class.
He was in Marseille with the McMahon family to support his sister.
“It’s a bit bittersweet when you’re sitting on the sidelines and being like, ‘I wish I was out there’ and feel like you deserve to be out there, but that’s just how sport goes sometimes,” he told Kissane.
“While it would have been nice to be racing myself, I was happy to see Eve doing so well,"he said.
Ewan persisted. He trained through that Paris Olympic summer, and in August, he recorded his best-ever Gold fleet performance at the ILCA7 European Championships in Sweden with a ninth-place finish in a race where he also beat his LA’28 rival Lynch, who he’s currently training with in Perth.
Last month Ewan was named as one of the recipients of the Los Angeles 2028 IOC Olympic Scholarships where he will get up to €26,500 over this cycle to help him qualify for Los Angeles.
Read the full interview in The Sunday Independent here
