Irish Paralympian is on a mission to help visually impaired people take part in sport
A former Team Ireland Paralympian who is visually impaired wants to help other people with sight conditions get involved in sport.
Joe Geraghty was born into a family of blind and visually impaired people, but he didn’t let this hold him back when it came to becoming an athlete.
Indeed, he has achieved amazing feats in the world of sport.
Mr Geraghty (67) won his first race at the inaugural May Games, now dubbed MayFest, in 1981. Two years later, he won a silver medal at the 500m at the IBSA European Games in Bulgaria.
In 1984, he represented Ireland at the Paralympic Games in the US.
Now, Mr Geraghty, who is based in Dublin, wants to give back.
As one of the founding members of Vision Sport Ireland, he has dedicated his life to encouraging people born with visual impairments to take up sport.
Having served as chairman of the body for several years, he was recently elected president. He has written a book called Out of Sight, hoping to inspire those with visual impairments to navigate the world of sport.
Mr Geraghty hopes the book will encourage aspiring athletes and give them practical guidance.
“It’s not going to be an absolute bible, but it’s going to show the way, I hope, to a lot of people, of how to overcome and move on,” he said.
The book also gives advice to visually impaired people on how to adapt to various sports. “I will take readers through all the main sports, but I’m not going to give you the rule book. I’m going to give you enough information to understand the sports,” he said.
Mr Geraghty describes the people who engage with Vision Sport Ireland as his “customers”.
Some notable customers who feature in the book include Paralympic gold medallist Jason Smyth, who Mr Geraghty describes as a “superstar”.
Smyth, a sprinter, is considered legally blind, with his central vision impaired because of Stargardt disease. He won six gold medals across four different Paralympics from 2008 to 2020.
Another customer Mr Geraghty writes about in his book is former New York police officer Paul McCormack.
“After 9/11, his sight kind of deteriorated rapidly as a result of being underground trying to recover those caught in the rubble,” Mr Geraghty said.
Mr McCormack, who had moved to New York from Ireland, started to realise his vision was impaired after failing a sharp-shooting test. Thirteen years after moving to the US, he returned to Ireland with his wife Nicola and the rest of his family.
Back home, he discovered Vision Sport Ireland, which gave him a love of golf.
“Friends were playing in a fundraising outing and were short a player. They invited me and offered to support me,” Mr McCormack says in the book.
“I was hesitant and felt I’d slow them down. I played, knocked in a few pars amid the snowballs, but the bug was back. I was introduced to Irish Blind Golf and I haven’t looked back.”
He has achieved success in his sport, having won both the British and US Blind Golf Opens. He has also obtained two Vision Cups, described in the book as “the Ryder Cup of Blind Golf”.
Mr Geraghty said most of his customers played a sport before suffering a visual impairment. He said he tries to instil in them a “positive addiction” by playing a sport they love.
“If it’s somebody who has had a loss of sight in their adult years, as part of the healing process, I would say look back at what you liked to do before your sudden drop of sight or total sight loss and if sport is one of them, don’t rule out returning to sport,” he said.
His number one piece of advice to those returning to sport following a physical impairment is to adapt to the sport at a slow pace. “A lot of footballers will you tell they are never going to run and that they hate running… and then when you say ‘just come out with me, let’s try at a slower pace’, then eventually, they get involved in Saturday morning runs,” Mr Geraghty said.
There’s no sport that cannot be played with a little bit of adaptation, he said.