Cathal Dennehy: No running away from issue of investment in Irish athletics

After the European Championships just gone, there’s something still so very twisted about the fact that one junior club in the Czech Republic has more professional coaches than all of Irish athletics.

Mon, 17 Jun, 2024 - 06:17

Cathal Dennehy

LET me tell you about an athletics club: AK Skoda Plzen. It’s based in Pilsen, Czech Republic, and has about 1,100 members. It’s focused mostly on teenagers, and is to Czech athletics what Blackrock College or St Michael’s are to Irish rugby: A production line for future stars.

When promising athletes hit their late teens, they typically move on to one of the country’s sports universities, where academics are fitted around their athletics careers.

Or else they join the Czech police or army, where international-level athletes are given special dispensation for their sporting obligations. This same system is in place in many athletics powerhouses, from Italy to Poland, Germany to Belgium.

This way, not only do athletes have a ready-made career to step into once their running days are done — a scary time for most — but they get a living wage and support while still competing. Very little work is actually required in those jobs, with all the flexibility granted to allow them fulfil their potential.

Because there’s more than one way to serve your country, and winning medals is one of them.

But anyway, back to AK Skoda Plzen. To develop those 1,100 athletes, the club employs 60 part-time and eight full-time coaches. You can probably tell where I’m going with this. It’s a drum I’ve beaten before, a drum I’ll beat again.

Because after the European Championships just gone, there’s something still so very twisted about the fact that one junior club in the Czech Republic has more professional coaches than all of Irish athletics.

Ireland punches significantly above its weight in athletics, but when it comes to investment in coaching, we’re a third-world nation. An embarrassment.

Let no press release or politician tell you otherwise. Last September, I was in Rome for the European U20 Clubs Competition where I got chatting to Jiri Kadla, one of the coaches at AK Skoda Plzen.

My first question after he outlined their remarkable coaching structures: How did they afford it?

The clue is in the name, with Czech engineering company Skoda Group offering significant sponsorship.

But there’s more to it than that. Kadla said they have a close relationship with local politicians, who are invited to events, who are willing, when it’s decision time in budgeting boardrooms, to invest properly in coaching — seeing the return for both the health of locals and for the strength of the national team.

And in Ireland?

Oh, rest assured our politicians will be out in force at the Paris Olympics, now just five weeks away. The lads in suits will be up in the stands of the Stade de France, roaring along as Ireland’s two best athletes — Rhasidat Adeleke and Ciara Mageean — chase Olympic medals.

If either wins one, you can bet they’ll also be available for photo ops, just as they were on Friday, when several medal-winning athletes from the European Championships were invited to Government Buildings to meet Simon Harris.

Thanks for your service. Now smile for the camera.

But if such politicians took a step back, they might wonder why Adeleke and Mageean have been based abroad for several years, and whether that might be related to the lack of investment in Irish coaches.

They might wonder if it’s fair that the coaches who steered them with such careful guidance in their time here — Johnny Fox and Daniel Kilgallon for Adeleke, Eamonn Christie and Jerry Kiernan for Mageean — had to do that work for free.

Maybe, while in Paris, they’ll catch the 100m hurdles. Sarah Lavin will be in it, after all. Her coach, Noelle Morrissey, started working with her at Emerald AC when Lavin was just eight and she’s done an outstanding job nurturing her to the top level.

Morrissey did that while holding down a full-time job in Nenagh, giving up thousands of evenings and weekends and having many discussions with her family over the years about whether she was devoting too much time to athletics.

They always told her to stick at it.

If those in power actually give a toss about women’s sport, then why not invest properly in someone like Morrissey, a coach who, in Lavin and Ciara Neville, has developed from grassroots level two of the four fastest Irishwomen in history? Invest in people, not PR campaigns.

If the suits do catch the 100m hurdles final in Paris, they’ll likely see France’s Cyrena Samba-Mayela and Puerto Rico’s Jasmine Camacho-Quinn in the medal shake-up.

Both are coached by John Coghlan, a Dubliner who spent many years pissing against the wind trying to earn a living coaching athletics in Ireland before giving up and going abroad, first to China, then to Florida, his expertise lost to Irish athletics and now being used to help foreign athletes.

In the last two years, the winds of change have started to blow but in truth, it’s only a gentle puff — a pot of €80,000 now split among the top 10 or so coaches. As Coghlan told me: “It’s an insult. Giving someone that little, someone is covering their backside, saying: ‘Yes, we are supporting coaches.’ But it’s less than peanuts. It’s shambolic. Do it properly or don’t do it at all.

“I take my hat off to the athletes and coaches (in Ireland) but I feel sorry for them. They think something is going to change, but it’s all talk. The same old lines. ‘We’re working on this. It’s a stepping stone.’ BS.”

This time last year, Samba-Mayela had a best of 12.73 seconds but knew she could be better and so moved to Florida to work with Coghlan, who broke down her technique, then rebuilt it. In Rome, she smashed the French record, clocking 12.31 to win the European title with the fastest time in the world this year.

Improvements like that get noticed, and Coghlan is in high demand by nations around the world who value his expertise. I recently asked him if he’d consider returning home.

“If there was the right situation, I’d always be open,” he said. “Nobody from any authority has ever spoken to me about anything.”

Which begs the question: Why the hell not?

Irish athletics is clearly on the up, with participation at an all-time high and Athletics Ireland doing important, impressive work in upskilling coaches.

Maybe the burden will fall to private investment to fill this void (anyone know if JP McManus likes athletics?) but until that arrives, we’ll continue to expect people to do a professional job despite treating them like amateurs.

That’s wrong. Fundamentally wrong.

Because for every Phil Healy, Sophie Becker, Sharlene Mawdsley, Thomas Barr, or Lauren Cadden, there’s a Shane McCormack, Jeremy Lyons, Gary Ryan, Hayley Harrison, or Dermot McDermott, putting in years — decades — of work to allow the nation to enjoy such medal-winning moments. And so many others, too.

While the athletes’ physios, nutritionists, psychologists, physiologists, and performance staff all earn a decent wage, as they should, the person with the biggest impact of all is expected to do it, essentially, for a pat on the back.

It’s a miracle so many of them bother. But Irish sport is so lucky that they do.