Tokyo will be Greta’s second Paralympic Games. She made her international debut in 2015 and followed it quickly with a European bronze medal in 2016. She was fourth in the T13 1500m final on her Paralympic debut in Rio in what was then a personal best of 4:45.06.
Since then she has won gold at the 2018 and 2021 European Championships. She credits her PE teacher Sean Gallagher for encouraging her to start running and coach Enda Fitzpatrick for bringing her to international standard.
Disappointed at only finishing fifth at the 2019 World Championships, she switched to train with the Dublin Track Club where she is coached by Feidhlim Kelly and trains with a group of current Olympians.
Greta’s times have made a huge leap this season when she knocked a whopping nine seconds off her 2018 PB. She ran 4:32.15 in May, retained her European title in Poland in early June with a new T13 European record of 4:29.38 and went on to lower it further, to 4:29.33, at the AAI Games in the same month. That time ranks her number one in the world in her event.
She competes in T13 because she has retinopathy with only vision in her left eye. Her family moved from Lithuania to Swords (Co Dublin) when she was 15 and she is a triplet. She has a degree in International Relations from DCU where she also obtained a Masters in Business Management in 2019. She works, two days a-week, for AIB to facilitate her training.
The opening ceremony of the 2020 Paralympics coincides with Greta’s 26th birthday.
