WHAT DREAMS MAY COME
Despite all the doubts, delay and darkness of the build-up, Ireland’s Olympians have the chance to achieve something truly special in Tokyo
OLYMPIC stories, at their most enchanting, are about stepping stones. The child who shows talent becomes the prodigious youth, and they are then sanded and moulded by setback and maturity and exposure, into the outstanding athlete that stands before us – ideally atop a podium, with a medal around their neck, tears in their eyes and the national anthem in their ears.
The drama relied on progression, setback and fulfilment, like all the best tearjerkers, and many fairytales, too. Ireland’s Olympic story was, for many decades, stoneless.
It was not about improving from a low point to a high point, but rather a circular glug of mediocrity, like so much water gurgling around a plughole. And exceptions to the story were triumphs of individual talent, bravery and hard work over often ineffective systems.
Heroes such as Sonia O’Sullivan emerged thanks to their own brilliance – and that excellence was honed further on the American varsity scene, and later a life based around elite training groups in London.
One rare exception of organised success was the boxing high performance system through the Olympics of 2008 and 2012, but it was understood within the sport that they were achieving in spite of, rather than because of, many of those in positions of influence in Irish boxing.
But 2020 was going to be different. The relationship between the Irish state and sport has been stuck in a dreary bind for generations, with politicians smothering sportspeople and teams with affection when there is a medal or a trophy won, but doggedly refusing to provide the investment required to compete on stages like the Olympic Games.
However, over the past two decades there has been an increasing professionalisation of elite Irish sport, with the development of the national sports campus, and the Institute of Sport in particular, evidence of this.
Prospective medallists can now be confident of support to help them realise their goals.
The rowing team going to Tokyo is a good example of this. Paul O’Donovan could return from Japan the most decorated sportsperson this country has produced, and his talent has been nourished from a young age, first in a remarkable local club in Skibbereen, through the high-performance programmes ran by Rowing Ireland.
His partnership in the lightweight men’s doubles is one of a number of viable rowing medals.
This revision of expectations upwards was only one of the ways the Irish story was going to be different this time. The Irish Olympic tale was marked by significant levels of trauma and farce in Rio, from news of a failed drugs test in the boxing camp breaking on the eve of the Games, to the sensational arrest of Pat Hickey and the intimate details revealed therein.
Ambitious Irish athletes didn’t take the old Olympic Council of Ireland seriously as a part of their plan to excel on the world stage. One dismissed the OCI as a travel agency: they were the organisational overlords when it came to the Olympics, but they had no role in actually helping someone improve athletic performance.
However, under the tight rule of Hickey, the OCI wielded its wider Olympic influence liberally. Olympic power for the few was the point. But starting on that grey Rio morning in August 2016, when police, accompanied by TV crews and a handful of journalists, raided Hickey’s room in the five-star Windsor Marapendi, the Irish Olympic movement took a first step towards somewhere more useful.
Purging the Rio scandal, and the years of dysfunction that preceded it, took months, but by March 2020, the Irish Olympic story had been transformed.
New leadership was elected and then hired, and a new name was chosen for the organisation.
Relations were built or rebuilt with corporate Ireland, and sponsors were attracted. Funding allowed for the employment of more expertise in areas that could actually make a difference to the lives of Irish athletes.
It is almost poignant to recall now one of the last events held in prepandemic Ireland, a bells-and-whistles announcement at Dublin airport in February 2020, at which it was revealed that Irish athletes would fly to Tokyo in business class.
This was not the way Irish athletes were used to being treated, but it seemed another instance of the changed relationships between those representing the Olympic movement in Ireland, and the people that are supposed to be at the heart of the Olympic story, the athletes.
Then the world went dark.
The Olympics were an early, inevitable casualty of a global shutdown, and in the 17 months since the decision was taken to postpone the Games for a year, there has rarely been a convincing case made for them to go ahead.
The reluctance of the people of Tokyo has been consistent, but the environment has grown markedly more volatile since January of this year, as Japan’s previous excellent efforts to suppress the spread of Covid 19 have become stretched and are now desperate.
The feelings of the Japanese people simply don’t matter to the global rulers of the Games, the International Olympic Committee.
Whereas local governance has been transformed beyond recognition in Ireland, in the imperious conduct of the IOC, the old failings of the Irish system can be glimpsed.
Covid is the great distorter of these Olympics. Besides the extreme pressure the pandemic has placed on local organisers, the pressures placed on athletes dealing with schedules that had to be ripped up and rewritten even as certainty has remained maddeningly elusive have been extraordinary.
Some of those stories have been detailed in these pages, with Irish hopefuls traipsing around Europe trying to reach qualifying standards in the tight windows prised open after the vicious third wave that swept Europe at the start of this year.
And now, after honouring a lifetime’s effort in getting to compete under the five Olympic rings, they will do so in empty venues.
This will be an echoey and edgy Olympics.
There will be none of the pomp or splendour that is such an irresistible part of the lore.
Athletes will arrive, compete, and go home.
Their days will not be spent looking for famous faces in the dining hall of the athletes’ village, or experiencing a new culture in the days after they have competed.
Their time in Japan will be about bubbles, and PPE and face masks and exhausting caution.
Dr Kate Kirby, the sports psychologist to the Irish team, is optimistic that once an athlete competes, their broader concerns will shrink away and they will, instead, devote themselves to the familiar demands of competition day.
‘PROSPECTIVE MEDALLISTS CAN NOW BE CONFIDENT OF SUPPORT’
That will be the hope, especially for those Irish athletes with chances of winning medals.
There has never been a bigger Irish team going to an Olympics, with the final tally of 116 boosted by the presence of two squads, in men’s rugby sevens and women’s hockey.
The rowing team provide two boats that look equipped for success, with predictions of even more than that. The men’s lightweight pair of Paul O’Donovan and Fintan McCarthy is recognised within their sport as the best in the world, to the point that informed observers say it will be a bigger surprise if they don’t take gold than if they do.
That expectation is pressure of a type not many Irish athletes have experienced, but it comes with its own risks. However, they have been so successful over the past two years, against practically all of the likely challengers they will race in Japan, that their status is justified.
Sanita Puspure ended the Rio Olympics in tears after failing to make the final in the women’s single scull. She had gone to Brazil with many expecting a medal. The five years since then have seen her excel, and since 2018 she has won the European and world championships twice each. She will be 40 in December, and knows this is her last chance, even in a tough sport where excellence is regularly only reached by an athlete in their late 30s.
Kellie Harrington is the next best hope of a medal, but the extraordinary fate of Katie Taylor in Rio, and the chaotic judging that cast such a shadow across the boxing arena, means predictions around the sport are perilous.
The athletics track will, as always, be fiercely competitive, and surviving through to a final will constitute success, even for a proven veteran like Tom Barr.
The value of this Olympic exposure to a brilliant young talent like Sarah Healy may only become apparent in Paris in 2024. The blazing Tokyo heat has meant the endurance events, the marathons and the walks, have been moved 800km north of Tokyo, to Sapporo, and Brendan Boyce in the 50km walk is regarded as potential podium finisher.
Jack Woolley has long been touted as a viable medal contender in taekwondo (not least by himself), and similar claims are made for Rhys McClenaghan in gymnastics.
The Olympics spills a hundred stories into Irish life that we have never heard before and, in truth, most of them we will never hear again. For an athlete, it is the achievement of a lifetime, but the watching world consumes and forgets and moves on.
The trick is maximising the number of stories that make people stop and cheer and never forget.
Doing that in any Olympic year is an awesome challenge.
Doing it in the aftermath of Covid19, and as the Irish Olympic story takes careful steps from infamy to integrity, is a steeper step again.