Symbolism leaves McIlroy’s Olympic hopes flagging

Walking around downtown Belfast earlier this week, it was nigh on impossible to get a sense of the recent brouhaha and violence that has left numerous police officers injured and resulted in the arrest of more than 100 people and counting.

The cafes and shops littered around City Hall were populated with the usual smattering of local and not-so-local going about their business, all oblivious to the lack of a Union Jack atop the fine old civic building for another day.

Flags. Nationalism. Sense of identity. Those of us in the rest of this island tend to take all of those things for granted and it hasn’t been difficult to pick up on a weary ‘what-are-they-at-now’ vibe as the latest flashpoint continued to spark stubbornly in Ulster.

Nobody I know has resorted to violence over the question of which flag Rory McIlroy will compete under at the 2016 Olympic Games but there is no doubt that many people in the Republic have been guilty of overreacting to the quandary in which the world number one now finds himself.

We too love our flags and other symbols. Few other nations mirror our fixation with draping our representatives with the Tricolour at sporting events and the plethora of GAA jerseys on the Costa del Sol or on Bondi Beach are similar projections of our need to stand out from the crowd, to declare our tribe.

Which is why McIlroy’s position exercises us to the extent it does.

The Holywood golfer’s assertion last September that he felt more British than Irish was met with a consternation that bordered on the ridiculous. As a northern Catholic, the gist of the reaction here was, when you break it all down, one of ‘how could he?’ And so the story has dragged on, day after depressingly predictable day in print, online and on air.

Pádraig Harrington was engulfed by The Great Debate again this week as he prepared for the Volvo Champions event in Durban. The Dubliner was reason personified in addressing the issue but, at this stage, words seem to be of secondary importance so long as the headline can squeeze in McIlroy’s name and the Games themselves.

It’s a ridiculous and tiring situation but one that begs the broader question as to just what place — if any — flags, anthems and other symbols of national identity have at a sporting event like the Olympic Games which, after all, was surely designed to promote and celebrate the physical abilities of the individual rather than any collective.

It’s apposite now to recall that it was Michael Morris, the third Baron Kilanin, and another man whose loyalties rested comfortably and confidently between Ireland and Britain, who once championed the total depoliticisation of the Olympic movement he led for so long.

Lord Kilanin was born in London and died in Dublin. Educated at Eton, the Sorbonne and Magdalene College Cambridge, he served with the King’s Royal Rifle Corps, took part in D-Day and served as the head of the Olympic Council of Ireland before succeeding to the equivalent, global position with the IOC.

For years, Kilanin had floated the idea that flags and anthems had no place in the Games and, in 1980, his beliefs found favour with 16 Western European nations — Ireland and Great Britain among them — who decided to compete in Moscow under the auspices of the Olympic flag and anthem rather than those of their own.

Even the opening ceremony was deemed an unpalatable expression of nationalism. Seven of the 16 opted out of that entirely while chefs de mission Ken Ryan and Dr Mick Palmer were the sole representatives for Ireland and Great Britain respectively. It didn’t last, of course, but how a similar shift in ideology would suit McIlroy now.

The world number one has recently floated the idea that he may not compete at all in Brazil in three years’ time and the pity of it is that there is no mechanism in the Olympic Charter which would allow him and any others uncomfortable with defined labels of nationalism to compete simply as an Olympian rather than an Irishman or Briton.

Four ‘independent Olympic athletes’ participated at the London 2012 Games but only because South Sudan and the territory formerly known as the Netherlands Antilles did not have national Olympic committees. McIlroy’s problem, of course, is that he has to choose between two which, unfortunately, rules out any suggestion of a third way.

“Only athletes who for some reason are not able to compete for a National Olympic Committee have the possibility to take part in the Olympic Games as Independent Olympic Athletes [IOA],” IOC spokesman Andrew Mitchell told the Irish Examiner yesterday.

It’s gonna be a long three and a half years.

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