Now ‘not the time’ for review
“If we are going to review performances this is not the appropriate place to review them — during the Olympic Games,” Finbarr Kirwan, High Performance Manager with the ISC said.
“There is a time and a place toreview the performances but that’s not right now. The time is when the Games are complete and people have had a time to reflect. Then we’ll do a full review.”
And he rejected the suggestion that the team had not performed in Beijing pointing out that all the targets had been achieved and that three Irish boxers were still contesting Olympic medals at the Games.
Henihan said on Wednesday that programmes designed by high performance people were there but they were not producing expected results.
“There is an investment of time, of paying the price with your life and the investment of finance in all this and when you put all the three together you’d expect to get a return and the athletes expect a return and when they don’t, of course you have to look at what has gone wrong,” he said.
“This has to be looked at very seriously. There are a lot of good people out there. They are not getting the results that they should be getting. There was a lot of disappointment at the track and we have to find out why.”
Kirwan disputed the suggestion that athletes performed below expectations or that the investment in the programme was not well spent.
“There are three things,” he said. “Firstly we are all very proud of this team. They have worked hard. They have put themselves into an environment that’s very, very difficult and they have performed to the best of their abilities.”
As regards the investment in the programme he said they had put €34million into this Olympic and Paralympic programme and they are satisfied that the return on that investment is actually beyond the targets that had been set.
“Right now we have nine finalists — we have three guys boxing for medals — and that in any man’s language is a delivery on the investment and we are happy with that,” he said.
“It’s a function of good relationships, good planning, great talent, great coaching and some good people in the system working very hard. A good example of that is boxing and we have a situation where we now have three boxing for medals. Contrast that with Athens where we had one boxer and contrast that with Sydney where we had one boxer. Now we had five qualified and three of those are boxing for medals and that’s a real achievement.
“Track and field — athletics — we are happy with the performances there. If you look at the performances in Athens where we had two finalists, we have four finalists here.
“I sat down with Patsy (McGonagle) and with Max (Jones) in advance of these Games and we talked about what was realistic; what we said was that if we can achieve what we achieved at the world championships in Osaka last year at an Olympic Games we would be very happy and that’s what we have done — four finalists — Rob Heffernan, Olive Loughnane, Roisín McGetting and Alister Cragg.
“Look at the performance of Olive (Loughnane) — that’s a world class performance and that reflects very well on her and her sport. The other issue is the critique of this team by the Chef de Mission of the OCI which I regard as highly inappropriate at this time when athletes are still in competition.
“For somebody to consider that those performances are below par obviously is at odds with the facts and, secondly, I know Dermot and he’s leading this team and he has a responsibility to lead this team through to the end of the Games so I would suggest that for him to be making a judgement on performances now is not right.
“The issue as regards the OCI is that the Olympic Council have a body work to do and that body work is up to and including the end of this Games and involves making sure the team gets to the Olympics in a ready state and is taken care of while they are here.
“We will look at the performances — not just of the athletes but across the board,” he said. “This is the most reviewed money in our sport and we are not afraid to look at how we have performed and how other bodies have performed.
“We are not afraid to do that and we will continue to do that because that’s how we learn and that’s how we get better. And the reason we are performing the way we are now is because we have done reviews in the past and we have looked at where mistakes have been made and we have learned from those.
“We are in a situation where we can really stand over what this team has done — nine finalists and three medals so far.” He said Patsy McGonagle, the Chair of High Performance with Athletics Ireland and manager of the track and field team in Beijing had presented the Institute of Sport and the Irish Sports Council with a plan for the future.
“We are looking at that,” he said. “Once we get back and everybody has had a chance to reflect we are going to sit down and we will work this out with athletics. We are committed to developing an excellent high performance plan with them and we will work together to get that done.”
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