Red tape still divides Ireland’s high performance leaders

Gary Keegan may have been talking about Irish Olympic sport in these pages a few days ago but what he said could apply to all of Irish sport.

Long before he assumed his current job of technical director of the Irish Institute of the Sport, he was performance director of Irish boxing, and a watershed was when in one of his first few days in that job he took a strip of red tape and ran it across the floor of the gym in the National Stadium. On one side of the line lay high performance; on the other side, where all the boxers stood, wasn’t.

He challenged and invited them to take the step. A decade on from Kenny Egan and company crossing that line, Keegan believes the choice remains as simple and as stark for all national governing bodies he deals with. “We’re high performing or not. You’re not going to compete at the top end unless you’re fully in. You can’t be half pregnant on this.”