Inside Golf: Ballybunion remembers its historic Olympic links

Golf returns to the Olympic Games next year after more than a century in the wilderness but a ceremony conducted on the fifth tee at Ballybunion over the weekend served as a reminder that the game has made a small contribution to Irish sporting success on the world’s biggest stage.

Bringing to mind scenes from the Oscar-winning film Chariots of Fire when British Olympians Harold Abrahams and Eric Liddell trained on the West Sands next to St Andrews, it was amidst the dunes of Ballybunion’s revered Old Course and specifically the fifth fairway that Bob Tisdall and Dr Pat O’Callaghan trained in preparation for the 1932 Olympics in Los Angeles.

O’Callaghan, from Kanturk, Co. Cork, had four years earlier become the first athlete from an independent Ireland to win an Olympic medal when he stood on the podium and collected gold in the hammer, while Tisdall, raised in Nenagh, Co.Tipperary, was a 400-metre hurdler.