OFI looking at the Irish-American route to make up €2m LA Games gap

Costs for an Olympic Games have inevitably gone up due to inflationary pressures and the extra distances involved in the next Olympics in Los Angeles in two years’ time.

Mon, 19 Jan, 2026 - 17:16

Brendan O'Brien

The Olympic Federation of Ireland (OFI) is targeting the USA’s Irish-American community in order to address a €2m shortfall that must be made up if the team is to match or better the seven medals won at the Paris Games in 2024.

Costs for a Games have inevitably gone up due to inflationary pressures and the extra distances involved in the next Olympics in Los Angeles in two years’ time. The bill for sending a team to Paris came in at €2.5m. The final balance for LA is estimated to hit €4.1m.

That’s in line with the bumps in overall costs in Olympic cycles with Tokyo’s ending at an €11m outlay and LA’s estimated to finish somewhere around €15m. The state contribution has gone up too, but not enough to bridge the gap that has appeared.

The plan now is to make up the deficit via the philanthropy route with American donors able to avail of 501(c)(3) regulations on tax relief for sporting causes and new laws in Ireland now allowing for relief on performance programmes as well as capital projects.

“The €2 million, for me, is the bare minimum we need to operate,” said LA 2028 chef de mission Gavin Noble, who has been to the Californian city four times since Paris to secure team bases and other logistical necessities, on Monday.

This drive has only just kicked off in recent weeks with OFI officials already managing to get boots on the ground in Boston. The East Coast will be a major and obvious focus given the Irish communities there. So will Chicago, San Francisco and Los Angeles itself.

The California Irish-American Legislative Caucus will visit these shores in the summer too with OFI chief executive Peter Sherrard confident there is money to be found in a community previously approached by the likes of Munster Rugby, various GAA units and others.

Part of the Paris success was the ability to make tweaks here and there for athletes that supported their performance. Housing some closer to their venues was an obvious example but aid can come in all sorts of small doses and long before the opening ceremony.

Among the small details that fed into the 2024 successes was the use of a €6,000 sum from the OFI’s ‘Make a Difference’ fund that was apportioned to double-medal winner Daniel Wiffen for his food when it was found he was calorie deficient.

Ireland’s funding of Olympic sports – and sport in general – has been a long and sometimes slow road. The situation has improved dramatically but this country remains a laggard when it comes to the monies some countries set aside.

A total of €94m was spent on the last Games cycle on a team that ultimately numbered 136 athletes and for a return of seven medals. New Zealand’s government poured €209m in, fielded a team of 195 and claimed 20 medals in the French capital.

“We are getting good bang for our buck,” said the OFI’s CEO Peter Sherrard.

The target for LA is not actually seven, as in Paris, but ten. The National High-Performance Sports Strategy has laid as much out in black and white and Noble, an Olympic triathlete in London in 2012, is happy to have that bar set so publicly.

“Sometimes in Ireland the hardest thing to talk about is the performance but if we take our lead from Daniel Wiffen and Rhys McClenaghan and Jack Woolley, those sort of athletes, it's what they're getting up every morning to try and do and we shouldn't be shy about it.”