They think differently.
The days when Irish athletes went to the Olympics and felt inferior, or just privileged to be there, or satisfied with gallant failure or making memories have been rooted out and renounced.
There is no tolerance in the system for deferential mediocrity. Humility is a good look after you win. Otherwise, it’s as useful as your appendix.
After Rhys McClenaghan reached the final of the pommel horse with the highest qualifying score last Saturday night he talked about “upgrading” his performance.
Daniel Wiffen anointed himself as “one of the greats” as soon as his first Olympic gold medal rested on his chest. That thought didn’t just occur to him. McClenaghan and Wiffen are two of the most extravagantly gifted athletes to ever wear an Irish vest. They can say what they like.
At their first Olympics Ross Corrigan and Nathan Timoney came off the water after their heavyweight pairs semi-final and talked openly about chasing a gold medal. It didn’t come across as cockiness or forced bravado; that thought had entered their shared existence long before now.
There was a time when Irish athletes, of all stripes, hid their dreams for fear of ridicule. That fear was the sire of failure. It didn’t happen for them on Friday. Immediately they spoke about LA in 2028. Same ambition.
Daire Lynch and Philip Doyle won bronze and in conversation an hour later Doyle included “disappointment” in their response. Since when was any Irish Olympic medal a “disappointment”? They had a different colour medal in their minds. This was the new thinking.
Paul O’Donovan and Fintan McCarthy became the first Irish athletes to defend an Olympic title in 92 years. That’s what they expected.
In 100 years of Ireland at the Olympics, this has been the greatest week. Not just for the medals but for the mood of bullish possibility. There were losses too, of course, and heartbreaks and stinging reversals, but nothing that defeated the mood.
Elite sport is about human resources: talented people pushing other talented people to be better. But it is also about money. The countries at the top of the medals table bat away accusations of “financial doping”. For a country with Ireland’s resources it is about smart, targeted investment.
In the Beijing cycle Sport Ireland invested €35 million in Olympic and Paralympic sports. In the Paris cycle, that investment has climbed to €89 million. For investment on that scale there must be a managed return. In the four years before the Beijing Games in 2008 Irish athletes won 109 medals at World and European championships, elite and junior; in this Olympic cycle that figure has trebled to nearly 330 medals.
Success at these Olympics is not a surprise. The performance trends were heading to this conclusion. Sport Ireland’s target for Paris was five to seven medals. Ireland’s biggest haul was six at London 2012. That record could fall by the end of this weekend.
What has emerged is consistency in sports that were first targeted with investment in the Athens cycle, more than 20 years ago. Boxing has endured a tough week – a couple of scandalous judging decisions and nine fighters eliminated early from a team of 10 – but it is still the fourth Olympics out of the last five in which Ireland has won at least one medal in the ring.
It is the third Olympics in a row where Ireland has won a medal in rowing. In sailing it is the third Olympics from the last four where an Irish boat has reached the medal race in a medal-winning position.
In this there are layers upon layers of good practice and institutional knowledge. Zaur Antia has been part of every boxing success since Beijing in 2008. James O’Callaghan has been sailing’s high performance director since 2006. Dominic Casey has managed the lightweight programme in Irish rowing since before Beijing. Not every federation has that kind of leadership, but working templates are in place.
The room for improvement never disappears, naturally. After every Olympics Ireland’s performance is the subject of a comprehensive independent review. One of the recurring metrics is how Ireland fared against a shortlist of so-called “comparator nations” – countries of broadly similar population and resources such as New Zealand, Norway, Denmark and Belgium. At the Tokyo Games Ireland finished behind all four of them on the medals table. This time, it will be closer.
“The potential is there for Ireland to become a 7-10 medal country across several sports,” said the Tokyo report. It also concluded that the medal count could have been higher at the last Games, “with several near misses across a number of sports. To meet future targets these near misses will need to be converted into medals”.
With Mona McSharry that is what happened. Between a near miss and a medal was a fingernail. Her story melted the hearts of a nation. In elite sport, hardness and ruthlessness and single-mindedness are celebrated above all else. But elite sport is not divorced from the human condition. McSharry reached an accommodation with her vulnerability. A story like that has a million landing spots in the world outside.
In January she told Eoghan Cormican about the morning in July 2022 when she was overwhelmed by feelings she could no longer suppress. McSharry couldn’t see how she could continue in swimming.
“I was hiding from myself the fact that I wasn’t happy in swimming because this is something I have mapped out for my life and something that I felt I had to do,” she said. “In my head, I was like, ‘I am going until 2024, that’s my plan, that is the big year. I am not stopping’.
“I was not enjoying training. I didn’t want to be there. It became a chore. Everything around swimming became a chore. I also felt really guilty for not wanting to be there. So I was constantly being conflicted . . . I was completely broken down at that point.”
Would her story have been any less remarkable if she had finished fourth? Or finished nowhere?
At the Olympics the tiniest margins are magnified and set in stone. The cruelty is only visible from one side. A day after McSharry won a bronze medal by one hundredth of a second, Liam Jegou was denied a medal in canoe slalom “by a centimetre”. In different measures the margin was probably the same.
In the final Jegou brushed against the last gate on the course, incurring a two-second penalty that catapulted him from second to seventh. Until that point, he had produced the race of his life on the biggest day. How do you reconcile that? How can you make a bed with the joy of performing and the despair of losing?
“I just couldn’t get my whole body through the gate,” he said a couple of days later. “I just clipped it with my back. It was the slightest touch. It will hurt for some time. It’s all I’ve ever dreamt of. That’s why the result is hard to take because it was eight, nine-year-old Liam’s dream to get an Olympic medal.
“But to paddle that way in the final was just surreal. Something I’ve worked for for so many years. It clicked at the right moment and it was almost perfect, at the right moment in front of the biggest crowd. I felt so in the flow. I didn’t think for a second about medals or anything really. I was just in my boat, paddling.
“I’m happy with the performance because I showed up. It’s so hard to do it – have your best stuff on the big day. It doesn’t happen very often. I was there for the fight for the medals. On the other hand I’m a little bit heartbroken because I came so close to something exceptional.”
For every athlete the Olympics dominates the skyline, visible every day, for years. You cannot think of it going badly. For most athletes it won’t go well. Of the 133 athletes on the Irish team, how many of them will go home satisfied. 20? Less than 20? Jegou had that experience in Tokyo.
“It took me a long time to get over Tokyo. The result and everything that went down. I kept myself from savouring the experience to the fullest because I was so focused on training and performance. I was so, so focused on the result in Tokyo.”
Here’s the deal: McClenaghan will win gold this evening; Wiffen will win another gold tomorrow; one of the showjumpers will win a medal on Monday; Kellie Harrington will win gold on Tuesday. Are they thinking of anything less?
After McCarthy and O’Donovan retained their Olympic title on Friday, O’Donovan was asked to put some context on the achievement. He answered in a flash.
“Believe me there will be a lot more Irish athletes who will do it in the future [defend an Olympic title]. And will do it more than twice, I have no doubt about that.”
That’s how they think.
