Minister calls for focus in future Games

SPORTS bodies should narrow their focus to key events if they want to broaden prospects for Olympic medals, Minister for Sports Martin Cullen said.

The minister said sports authorities in Britain and China had concentrated on events like cycling and sailing in a deliberate effort to win medals and had succeeded. He said Ireland needed to take a similar approach in preparations for the next Games in London in 2012.

“I am going to talk to all the individual bodies and the Sports Council to look at what we can target in advance of London,” said Mr Cullen.

He said the focus on boxing for this year’s Games had delivered results and he believed the same success could be achieved in other areas.

Mr Cullen said he also had made arrangements to meet with Sebastian Coe, chairman of the organising committee for the London Games, to see how Ireland might prepare for the competitions.

“These are decisions that we need to take immediately,” he said.

The Irish Sports Council, however, has commenced its post-Olympics review, which is expected to be completed by the end of the year and published with recommendations early next year. Spokesman Paul McDermott said the review was a standard procedure and would seek views on how things could be improved, but he stressed the council was pleased with the performance this time out.

“The last review, after Athens, set a very specific target in terms of finalists and medals and we have reached that target, so we feel very happy,” he said.

Mr McDermott also urged critics of Ireland’s performance not to measure success purely in terms of the money invested in the sports.

More than €30 million was spent on the Olympic effort over the past four years, which, by crude measurement, meant a spend per medal of €10m. A further analysis of medal wins measured against national income or GDP showed that while China won the most medals of all 204 participating countries, the real victors were countries like the Dominican Republic, Mongolia, Zimbabwe and Ethiopia, all of which punched far above their economic weight.

Ireland performed badly by that measurement, as the country’s 31st place ranking in the world GDP table suggests we should have achieved a better spot in the medal table than the 63rd place we occupy.

Mr McDermott said such analyses were interesting, but rarely complete. “An analysis like this gives a certain amount of insight, but it doesn’t tell the full story. If you look at countries like Jamaica and Ethiopia who we’re often compared with, they specialise in one area — running.

“We’re also often compared with New Zealand because we’re similar in size and other ways, but they have had high-performance systems in place for years while we’ve just begun.”