Olympic reality - A very poor strike rate

Now that the justified euphoria surrounding our medal winners at the London Olympiad has subsided just a little, maybe it’s time to take a more hard-nosed, less emotional look at how Team Ireland performed.

Unfortunately, more than half of sports supported through high-performance unit funding did not realise their ambitions. These ambitions did not target medals, just excellence in performance.

Sadly, most especially for the athletes, Irish performances too often fell into the participation category rather than the contenders’ category. Of course a small country cannot hope to win too many medals but our strike rate was very poor.