Sanita Puspure insists she is keeping her eyes off the prize after a winning start to her third Olympics.
But her Team Ireland colleagues Philip Doyle and Ronan Byrne have to dig deep now to find a way to the final in the men's sculls after a morning to forget at the Sea Forest Waterway.
Beaten in the quarter-finals of the women's single sculls in London and Rio, 39-year-old Puspure is ranked top four in the world and so a live medal hopeful in Tokyo.
She was the first member of Team Ireland to get her challenge underway, going out in the second heat with a place in the top three to make Monday's quarters the initial target.
Back home in Ballincollig, her husband Kaspar stayed up to watch her win easily, but her two children, Patrick and Daniela, were sleeping.
"I will talk to him," smiled Puspure. "He is working tomorrow.”
After a slow start she found her rhythm and her 8.13 second victory over Mexico's Kenia Lechuga in the six-boat race led Team Ireland's Twitter account to mischievously dub her 'dominant' Puspure, in reference to the congratulatory press release sent out by then Minister for Sport Shane Ross after her World championship gold medal victory in 2018.
It was a good news story to begin with, although it was followed by the shock of Doyle and Byrne's fourth and last place finish soon after, when a top three spot would have qualified the 2019 World Championship silver medallists.
Too upset to rake over the bones of their disappointment later with the media, the sub-par performance leaves them scrapping in the repechage tomorrow to keep their medal ambitions alive.
For Puspure, their was satisfaction in her opening display.
"It was OK, it was first race done," she said. "The start could have been better but we will work on it.
"Focusing on the next race now and taking it one race at a time, not thinking too far ahead, keeping calm, collected.
"You don't think too far ahead, you focus on one race at a time and get through the rounds safely and you just think about the next race that you have to do and not the race that you might be doing in a week's time."
Having struggled initially with lockdown last year in terms of finding motivation to training, Puspure clicked into gear.
“Yeah, it’s been a long wait,” she sighed.
Puspure's heat win was 11 seconds slower than that of New Zealand's Emma Twigg, one of her main rivals for a gold medal, but the conditions switched from cross headwind to a tail wind for Twigg's race.
Like the Irish athlete, the Kiwi is desperate to medal after missing out in the last two Games, when she was fourth both times. Twigg is the current world number one.
"You can see the flags, it swings around a lot, so for our race I think it was a cross and a head wind," said Puspure.
"But it changes very rapidly. So I think you just have to go with it and adapt as you go.
"You're only racing five people when you race so you can't think too far ahead.
"We had a really good training camp in Italy, so we'll just have to wait and see."
Puspure is aware of the good luck messages that have poured and she will respond when the time is right. For now, she is down to business.
"I read all the messages but I don't reply to them," she said.
"But I soak in all the positive energy and positive vibes from home and I'll give it back to all the people who wish me well after the Games."
"It wasn’t too hard today but it is going to get harder as it goes along. Just focusing on one race at a time.
"Just getting through it now, if I was third it wouldn’t make much difference.
"It was just to get a good race out of the way. Every race I do just brings my physiology up a little bit as well, you know?”
