OFI president Sarah Keane has tonight welcomed the Government's decision to allow around 200 Tokyo hopefuls to return to their training bases on Monday.
The move has received the green light from the Department of Health after lobbying by the Olympic Federation, Sport Ireland and the Department of Sport, including Ministers Shane Ross and Brendan Griffin.
Some of Ireland's best Olympic medal hopefuls feared that they were falling behind their competitors who had returned to their training centres and resumed full training over the past few weeks.
The OFI went public last week, expressing dissatisfaction that the lobbying had not initially worked.
But now National Sport Campus in Abbotstown and other centres of excellence will throw their doors open to the high performance competitors from the start of next week.
"Absolutely thrilled to say there's been confirmation from the Department of Sport this evening," Keane told RTE.
"Everybody's very aligned, Sport Ireland, ourselves, the Department, all the Departments, Ministers etc, to say that by Monday the high performance athletes (can return).
"Now it's a small cohort of people who will all be following very strict protocols in line with the public health measures, but they'll be able to get back to their sport and their training.
"Everyone understood what was happening in the country and we needed to put the health of the nation in front of individuals, but at this stage we're moving through the roadmap, we've definitely seen all our competitor nations across Europe go back.
"We were getting to a point whereby the dreams of these individuals, the work they would have put in - not just for the last couple of years, but their whole lives, and with their families supporting them - really that investment might well have been lost."
Speaking last Friday, world champion rower Sanita Puspure commented: "Every week you postpone getting back to your training you're giving your opponent an advantage.
"And it's not easy to watch them, all the pictures on Instagram and Twitter, of them back on the water because they have all been isolating together as crews, as a team, and they therefore can return to the water in crew boats.
"We are maybe a bit behind our opponents but in saying that we have still been training as hard as we had have been if the lockdown hadn't happened.
"There is a massive advantage in having a team around you and I think the most shocking thing for me was to see all the people in the clubs got to go on the water before all the high performance athletes got to".
