Hopefuls hard at work as we’re halfway to Rio

Ah, Rio.

It wasn’t hard to drift off in blissful contemplation of the Brazilian beach-side city this week with temperatures in Ireland scraping lower than at the Winter Olympics in Sochi. Wind and rain levels were significantly higher too and the very sight of all that skiing and curling and snow boarding in Russia served as a reminder that we are already at that midway point between Summer Games.

Another primer came in the Aston Suite of Dublin’s Alexander Hotel on Wednesday when the Irish Sports Council announced the latest raft of funding for high-performance programmes and core grants for National Governing Bodies where... ah, no, we’ll not bore you with the details.

That’s the thing, isn’t it? The Olympics are a great yoke altogether but only in the bubble that is the two-week period when the world takes a ride on whatever white elephant project is hosting the whole thing. Let’s be honest, it’s hard to generate or feign interest in the whole lark now when we’re being spoon-fed a daily diet of Premier League.

We’ll spare you the mechanics then — all those euro signs and noughts and talk of structures, systems and the like — but you might be interested to know the atmosphere inside that hotel two days ago was a lot less fraught than that which turned the arteries that are normally Dublin’s streets into car parks.

That ‘entente’ in itself would have been newsworthy not so many years ago and, though it is in the DNA of all sporting officials to be unhappy with their slice of the pie, it’s worth pointing out that the sports fraternity in this country have gone a long way to bringing order to its own house while those of others have fallen apart.

John Treacy, chief executive of the Irish Sports Council, spoke of how there was very little pain in Irish sport in 2013 while Kieran Mulvey — who readers of these pages may know more from his work in solving one of the disputes between the Cork County Board and its players, rather than his day job with the Labour Relations Commission — was even more upbeat.

There was talk of how Ireland is punching above its weight on the international scene and how structures, systems, governance and all sorts of other humdrum best practice indicators had kicked on like a Kenyan down the home straight in recent years. And much more besides.

Of course, none of that will matter a jot to most people when Team Ireland descend on Rio in 2016 and the media follows suit. Sport has always been a breeding ground for hyperbole, good and bad, and nowhere is the climate more receptive to that germination than the Summer Olympics.

You can talk about structures all you want but the only one Joe and Josephine Soap gives a hoot about is a podium.

Happily then, the signs are good. Irish athletes won a record 67 medals at global and continental events in 2013. That is up six from the year before and up 56 from 2009, the same point in the London cycle.

“London was a significant jump forward,” said ISC high performance chief, Paul McDermott. “With last year’s results we would have had five boxers qualify already and you would have had a number of sailors qualified. So we would be happy with how the performances went last year in the sense that athletes, coaches and performance directors delivered and tried to remove that big dip post-London.”

Somewhere out there are young Irish men and women whom very few of us have ever heard of, but who will wear a green singlet or swimsuit or blazer in Brazil, yet most of those we will be cheering on are already well-known to us: boxers, athletes, sailors and riders. You know yerself.

This is a big year for a lot of them. August and September will spit out European or World championships in athletics, swimming, rowing, sailing and equestrian — the last two of those serving as Olympic qualifiers — but there is too much that can happen between now and the opening ceremony in the Maracana to be anyway certain of how we’ll stand then.

Those funding levels we mentioned earlier have remained largely the same this last year after a raft of Government budgets where the sport spend was sliced and diced and Mulvey addressed the bods in attendance from the department in charge of sport directly two days ago when expressing the hope that the current amounts represented the “floor” on which we could now build again.

There’s no guarantee of that, of course. Things change. Stuff happens.

All the best practice in the world was meaningless when show jumper Clem McMahon’s Nations Cup champion ‘Pacino’ suffered a tragic death 12 months ago, or last October when John Joe Nevin decided that the pro boxing game couldn’t do without him any more.

That’s two of our best Olympic medal prospects gone. Just like that.

Food for thought come 2016. If not for now.

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