Building blocks now in place for elite success for Irish athletes as facilities improve

Our boxers, used to gruelling training camps in places like Russia, will finally be able to entertain the world’s best in their own backyard, writes Brendan O’Brien

Let’s start with a quote from The Greatest.

“The fight is won or lost far away from witnesses,” said Muhammad Ali. “Behind the lines, in the gym, and out there on the road, long before I dance under those lights.”

Like so much Ali said, it has been borrowed, regurgitated and contorted by many a sportsperson in the years since. And with good reason.

Ali knew that bouts were merely the public expression of the months and years of preparation that preceded them and it was that line of thinking that intruded yesterday on the drive towards the National Sports Campus in West Dublin where the latest piece of that beguiling jigsaw, the National High Performance Training Centre, was being unveiled.

The campus is morphing into a thing of real beauty though it remains in a chrysallis stage and the low-key entrance in Abbotstown is symbolic of a facility not quite ready to puff out its chest and proclaim its triumphant arrival. The National Aquatic Centre and a few floodlights peer out over thick green perimeter railings and hedging, but little else is visible from the road.

A few discreet signs on the way in declare somewhat meekly the site’s true purpose and the fact that it won facility of the year at last year’s Sports Industry Awards. Not bad, given it is hardly half-finished. Bollards and road diversions still abound for now. The skeleton of what will be the National Indoor Arena is straining to reach for the sky.

The whole expanse takes up over 500 acres of prime real estate and Kieran Mulvey, the chairman of Sport Ireland, joked yesterday about how they are probably now the biggest land owners in North Dublin.

“It is an extraordinary achievement,” he said of the campus, one “dedicated to the professionalism” of the athletes for whom it is intended.

New builds have been springing up like mushrooms there for some years now. Sport HQ, the FAI and the Institute of Sport huddle together in one corner, centres dedicated to pursuits including modern pentathlon and horse jumping dot other extremities while pitches, both turf and synthetic, have colonised land once used by the State to test animals and crops.

Other as yet uncultivated stretches have been claimed by organisations such as the IRFU, the signs proclaiming as much resembling the stakes driven into the virgin American Midwest soil by 19th century can-do pioneers to declare ownership. No-one wants to miss this gold rush and the National High Performance Training Centre is one of those developments that lets the nuggets shine.

Built at a cost of almost €4 million, it took another €721,000 to kit it out. It will be, in essence, a one-stop shop for our best and brightest, encompassing elite physical conditioning, testing, rehabilitation, nutrition, physiology, medicine, precision analysis, education, and life skills support. All under the one roof.

The centre boats a four-lane 130m track, strength and conditioning services, medical back-up, physiology expertise and much more. Five boxing rings will stand in one room, each covered by four cameras to record every slug and slip. Our boxers, used to gruelling training camps in places like Russia, will finally be able to entertain the world’s best in their own backyard.

It is here where almost 200 Irish high performance athletes, coaches and support staff across up to 20 different sports will train, exchange expertise and, according to the press release on yesterday’s unveiling “achieve their potential” up to Rio and far beyond. How far that potential will take them is another thing.

Gary Keegan is the man in charge of the centre which is housed at the Irish Institute of Sport which he serves as director and, though he was unwilling to frame this latest step in the evolution of Irish sport in terms of Olympic medal potential, he was clear when he pointed out just how beneficial such a centre can and will be for our best athletes.

“I’m reluctant to say that we have any direct responsibility for medals. We have a more indirect (role) but we will try over the next year or two to measure the impact of science and medicine on performance. Then we can say what role we have played in the individual performance of an athlete. If we want to be world class, we have to be able to define what that looks like in this context.

“It is about developing that sense of ‘we belong here, we belong with the best’,” he explained. “That we have what athletes in other nations have, so that when our athletes are training in other facilities across the world they are not looking around in awe. So this is about the physical environment and it is about feeding the mindset of our athletes and coaches: that there are no excuses.”

There was a time when talk of sports facilities and services in Ireland was dominated by what we lacked, a 50m pool being the obvious example.

Those days are long gone and dwindling ever further into the murky distance of the past. The National Indoor Arena will be done later this year, a tender went out for a National Velodrome last week.

No excuses, indeed.

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