Review praise for boxing programme

KENNY EGAN’S silver medal and bronze medals for Paddy Barnes and Darren Sutherland earned boxing top billing in the Olympic Review.

“The strongest output of the Beijing cycle in Olympic terms has been the demonstration of ‘what good looks like’ within the boxing programme,” the report states.

“This programme has delivered not only success within the Olympic sphere but has subsequently followed up with more medals at world junior and European championships and suggests its strengths are systematic and structural, consistent and repeatable.

“This is not to say that boxing’s model could or should be applied in all sports, rather that it contains a number of key elements, some of which might profitably be replicated by others, including strong leadership, clear targets, flexibility and dynamism of approach, structured programme, multi-disciplinary support services, effective sports psychology and a robust training and competition regime.”

Dr Neil Hunnicliffe, a leading consultant who was employed to assist in preparing the Review said that while athletes were not in a physical condition to compete at the highest level in Athens, four years on physical conditioning was no longer a problem but what seemed to be more of a problem was the mental readiness to compete.

“Physical conditioning gets built over a period of years — and the same is true of psychological preparation,” he said.

“Irish sport needs to pay more attention to that, from initial goal-setting for the Games through to the nitty gritty of on-the-day preparation and how athletes go out to compete.

“Boxing got that absolutely right through the detailed, dedicated and intensive use of a psychologist. There were other sports who saw the psychologist as a ‘would like to have’ rather than a ‘must have’ and the impact the boxing psychologist had on athletes shows the importance of a discipline that could profitably be replicated across a number of other sports.”

nFOR the second successive Olympic Games an Irish horse was central to a doping controversy but it merited only the briefest mention in the Beijing Review.

Dealing with the preparations and selection of the team it recalled how the Irish showjumping team failed to qualify and how the individual berth was qualified through Jessica Kuerten’s third place in the world rankings.

When Kuerten did not accept the nomination, Denis Lynch, and his horse Lantinus, were subsequently nominated.

“Lynch and Lantinus progressed through qualification in Hong Kong to reach the final but, with Lantinus having tested positive for a prohibited substance, Lynch was removed from the start list and suspended from the competition,” the ISC Review recalls. “This incident has been subject to formal proceedings through FEI (world governing body) and to an enquiry by a panel of experts convened by HIS (the Irish governing body).”