It was Ronnie Delany who first championed the phrase “once an Olympian, always an Olympian”. In the 100 years of Ireland’s participation, it remains an utterly unique and honourable distinction, set to continue at the Games of 33rd Olympiad in Paris later this month.
Paris is an entirely fitting host city for the 2024 Games, given it also hosted the 1924 Olympics, 100 years ago, and that this year is also the centenary of Ireland’s first Olympic participation as the Irish Free State, 17 months after it was established under the Anglo-Irish Treaty of December 1922.
The truth is, there is no exactly recorded number of Irish-born Olympians. Beginning with the first modern Olympics in Athens in 1896, and up to Antwerp in 1920, dozens if not more would have had to compete for the Great Britain and Ireland team, or else competed for the USA, having emigrated there at some point.
What is known is that many of them won Olympic medals, starting in Athens in 1896, where Dublin-born Oxford student John Pius Boland abandoned his lecture tour of Greece and won a gold medal in the men’s tennis singles and doubles while representing, to his everlasting regret, Great Britain.
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Boland, incidentally, attended Catholic University School in Dublin, as did Delany, who would win his Olympic gold medal 60 years later with victory in the 1,500m in Melbourne.
That early period also saw John Flanagan, Martin Sheridan and Peter O’Connor win Olympic medals representing either the United States or Great Britain and Ireland, while never forgetting their homeland either. Flanagan and Sheridan were among the group of seven athletes known as The Irish Whales, most of whom had emigrated to New York, and won a remarkable 12 gold, two silver and eight bronze in various throwing events for the USA.
In another Olympic milestone, we then had the only Irishman ever to win an Olympic gold medal and an All Ireland medal, when Edmond Barrett from Kerry won gold with Great Britain in the tug-of-war in London in 1908, having also been on the London All Ireland senior hurling winning side of 1901.
To mark the centenary of our participation, the Olympic Federation of Ireland (OFI) undertaken a series of initiatives, beginning with an official list of the 911 sportspeople who have represented Ireland at the Olympics since Paris in 1924 to the delayed Tokyo Olympics in 2021.
The number will surpass 1,000 in Paris this month, given that the Irish team will consist of about 130 athletes in 15 sports, the largest in our Olympic history.
Starting with those 1924 Games, Ireland has now participated at 22 Summer Games and eight Winter Olympics, beginning in 1992 in Albertville. During that time, we have won 38 Olympic medals, including three in the early arts and literature events, which were featured from 1912 up to London 1948, where Marion Hamilton won bronze for her painting Meath Hunt.
Four Irish medals were won at the Tokyo 2020 Olympics – delayed by a year because of Covid-19 – the latest being the gold Kellie Harrington won in the women’s lightweight boxing, a week after Paul O’Donovan and Fintan McCarthy won gold in the lightweight rowing double sculls.
Of the now 45 Olympic sports, Ireland has only won medals in six: athletics (seven), boxing (18), swimming (four), rowing (three), sailing (two) and equestrian (one).
For Paris 1924, which took place from May 20th right through to October 28th, Ireland was represented by a team of 48 athletes, 46 men and two women, in five sports – athletics, water polo, boxing, football and tennis – plus the arts and literature events. The two women were Phoebe Blair-White and Hilda Wallis, both in tennis.
Given the limited preparation of our then Team Ireland, it’s no great surprise that our sporting success wasn’t much to write home about: from that team of 48 athletes, the best result was for Thurles boxer Paddy Dwyer, also known as Rocky, who settled for fourth in the welterweight division, already so exhausted he was unable to box off the bronze.
But most credit for Ireland’s first Olympic appearance goes to the football team, who played Bulgaria on May 28th, winning 1-0 thanks to a goal from Paddy Duncan of St James’s Gate. That is also now recorded as the first international played by the Ireland soccer team, and it happened some weeks before the 1924 Games’ opening ceremony on July 5th, 1924.
The OFI has given the honour of Ireland’s first Olympian – as in, number one of their current list of 911 – to Larry Stanley, the first individual athlete in 1924, in the high jump, and also considered one of Kildare’s greatest footballers of all time.
History was made on another front when Noel Purcell, who had represented Great Britain in water polo in 1920, competed for Ireland in the same event in 1924, the first athlete to represent two nations.
Beginning in the 1912 Games in Stockholm at the insistence of Pierre de Frédy, the modern Olympic movement founder better known as Baron de Coubertin, medals were awarded for works of art inspired by sport.
Of eight Irish artistic entries in 1924, two won medals: Jack B Yeats, younger brother of William, won silver for his painting Liffey Swim, and in a reportedly tight race for the literature medals, poet and doctor Oliver St John Gogarty won bronze for his Ode to the Tailteann Games.
Four years later, and just 13 months after making his competitive debut in the hammer event, Dr Pat O’Callaghan won Ireland’s first Olympic medal in sport, and it was gold. The Cork athlete improved his distance by 20 inches in his next-to-last throw, his mark of 168 feet and seven inches just four inches beyond that of silver medal winner Ossian Skjold from Sweden.
O’Callaghan defended the title in Los Angeles in 1932, ably assisted in his final preparations by Bob Tisdall, who moments earlier had won the gold medal in the 400m hurdles, and would likely have won a third gold medal in 1936 had the political split in Irish athletics – which resulted in Ireland not sending any athletes to the Berlin Olympics that year – not happened.
The 1952 Olympics in Helsinki marked further progress when then Olympic Council of Ireland president Lord Killanin, a future president of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), helped pass an amendment which allowed those born in Northern Ireland to also represent Ireland, thus allowing an all-island team for the first time.
At those same Helsinki Games Belfast-born John McNally won Ireland’s first Olympic medal in boxing, taking home silver. Four years later, after the long trip to Melbourne, Delany famously won his 1,500m gold at age 21, and there were four more medals, in boxing, for Fred Tiedt, John Caldwell, Freddie Gilroy and Anthony Byrne.
Melbourne also saw Kilkenny-born Maeve Kyle make history as the first Irishwoman to compete in the Olympic track and field programme, running the 100m and 200m, those being, believe it or not, the longest events open to women at that time.
Fast forward to Sydney 2000, where Sonia O’Sullivan became the first Irishwoman to win an Olympic medal on the track, with her silver medal over 5,000m, 12 years before Katie Taylor made history as the first Irishwoman to win gold in boxing.
For the 2024 Paris Olympics, there is now full gender parity for the first time, all 45 sports split 50:50 men and women,
Now, in the final countdown to the opening ceremony on July 26th, the OFI can boast the best-prepared Irish team in Olympic history, given the unprecedented level of funding and support available to all those who qualified; Sport Ireland funding for Olympic sport was up to €89 million for this four-year cycle, compared to the €59 million invested for Tokyo.
There are real Irish medal hopes across a variety of disciplines, from boxing to rowing and from golf to gymnastics, and an added excitement about the athletics team too, after they brought home four medals at the European Championships in Rome in June.
And for all those Irish athletes who do take part in Paris, there is great honour alone in the adding of their names to those chosen few who have gone before. “Once an Olympian ...”
