Ireland's Olympians get their timing spot-on in sport's summer recess
MAKE MINE A DOUBLE: Double European Gold Medallist Ellen Walshe's homecoming at Dublin Airport. Pic: ©INPHO/Tom Maher.
It’s 14 years this week since London beamed in the glow of an Olympic party that, at the time, felt like it might buck the trend of every summer Games that came before it and prove to be actually, genuinely transformative.
Danny Boyle’s opening ceremony captured the imagination from minute one with his affectionate nods to everything from James Bond to the NHS and the Industrial Revolution. It fed into a feelgood factor already helped by Team GB’s official tune.
David Beckham called ‘action’ before a gaggle of the hosts’ stars – Chris Hoy and Jessica Ennis-Hill among them - mimed and acted out the words to Queen’s thumping ‘Don’t’ Stop Me Now’. It was tongue-in-cheek fun, brilliantly done, and a nation was smitten.
It was tempting at the time to think that maybe this was the moment when the UK media and public could wean itself off its daily diet of football feed and filler. That this energy and open embrace of athletics and swimming and boxing could be the start of something.
And here in Ireland, too. It was a naïve thought. A chimera.
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The Premier League started six days after the closing ceremony, Swansea City’s Michu scoring the first goal of the season in a 5-0 thrashing of Queens Park Rangers at Road, and that was basically that. The machine was grinding again. Olympic ripples ended by the wave.
Ireland’s story wasn’t much different. Those 2012 Games produced a whopping 22 medals for this island, but our athletes and swimmers and rowers and gymnasts still operate in an environment where time in the spotlight is finite.
We all moved on from London. And from Beijing, Tokyo and Paris.
It makes grabbing the moment so vital.
That’s why events in Birmingham and Paris this last week were as timely as they were heartening with Team Ireland finishing ninth in the medal table at the European Athletics Champs and 11th in the same ladder at their swimming equivalent.
The GAA’s decision to pull back the blanket that is their inter-county championships two months earlier into the calendar has been debated ad nauseum in those circles, but the laws of unintended consequences have worked in favour of our Olympic sports.
There was no GAA to distract last week. No Premier League, no Test rugby. The World Cup was a memory, Wimbledon had long closed its doors, the Tour de France had vacated the roads. Only some club GAA and three Irish clubs in Europe.
It was the same four years ago in Munich where the multisport European Championships filled a suddenly enormous void left in the Irish sporting summer by the playing of the hurling and Gaelic football deciders in the month of July.
A year before, remember, and Tyrone and Mayo had met in Croke Park the second week in September.
And this is the important point here. Opportunity is one thing, grabbing it another. The fortunate fact is that so many of our ‘Olympic’ sports have been almost perfectly poised to make the most of this unexpected gift with their performances on the ground.
The Olympics is a sporting sausage. We’re all happy to digest it every four years but plenty are blithely uninterested in how it comes to be made. Our athletes largely go about their business in far-off and sometimes obscure foreign lands, out of sight and mind.
Ireland’s eventers secured this country’s first three official quota places for the 2028 LA Olympics by finishing fourth in the FEI World Championships in Aachen over the weekend. That’s a sentence that will mean next to nothing to most of the public.
Maybe the most encouraging part of what we witnessed in Birmingham and Paris last week was, in a weird way, the disappointments as elite achievers like Daniel Wiffen and Sarah Healy fell short of their ceiling and their podium potential.
It’s not so long ago that Ireland’s chest would have been left bare had people of that calibre come up short, for whatever reason, simply because there weren’t any more of them to go around. The talent pools are so much deeper now.
Wiffen was the star turn at the Paris Olympics but Ellen Walshe and Mona McSharry took up that baton in the French capital this time. Mark English, Andrew Coscoran and Kate O’Connor scaled new heights in England, Rhasidat Adeleke rediscovered her mojo.
There is no mathematical formula for ranking these achievements. If the colour of medal is the ultimate arbiter then there is an argument to be made that the silver won by Adeleke and silver and pair of bronzes claimed by McSharry might be of similar worth.
It’s one thing to scale a mountain the first time. Doing it again is another.
Adeleke has overcome injury and loss of form, McSharry battled with a loss of appetite and love for her sport. Rhys McClenaghan, in action at the Men’s Artistic Gymnastics Championships in Zagreb this week, is another who rolled the rock back uphill.
Other, big picture, challenges remain.
Ireland still suffers from an alarming lack of 50m swimming pools, as explained in a report released earlier this year. Athletics coaches who prepare our elite track and field stars still aren’t supported financially to anything like the level needed.
Both of those issues are better than they were, and the money being put into sport by the state is on a long upward curve, but finance and the lack of enough of it continues to act as a brake on what this country can potentially achieve.
The Premier League lumbers back onto our screens and into the very depths of our collective cerebral cortex this Friday when Frank Lampard’s Coventry City faces Arsenal’s reigning champions at the Emirates.
Another marathon rugby season will soon start to stretch its legs. The inter-county GAA scene will reassert itself come the New Year. Our Olympians will return to the margins but ready and able to make the most of the next window that opens.
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