I was having a beer with Greg Allen in Zurich last weekend and he was telling me about Rory McIlroy’s arse. It was early and the beer was light and it was the usual straight talk about the body composition of the men and women we must observe professionally on a daily basis.

Greg had flown to the European Championships directly from the USPGA, at Valhalla, where he and everybody else had stood back in plain old admiration at McIlroy winning his second major in a month – and for good reason.

"And Rory's got that real athlete's body now," Greg told me, eminently qualified to make the comparison given his decades of RTÉ commentary on both athletics and golf.

"Not totally ripped, in the Tiger Woods sense; he's just superbly conditioned, especially when you watch him from behind."

Indeed McIlroy has been championing his own body composition lately, having added three kilograms of pure muscle in the eight weeks before Valhalla.

The only thing surprising about that is why more professional golfers aren’t doing likewise, especially when you watch them from behind.

What is certain is there is no room for manoeuvre when it comes to the body composition of the elite athlete: from the moment you step inside the orbit of their world they are all models of complete athleticism, male or female, and for that reason we take all their achievements for exactly what they are worth, male or female, and applaud the most worthy of them in plain old admiration.

Perfect escape

In that regard all that unfolded at the European Championships in Zurich felt like the perfect escape and antidote from the hysterical outbreak of opinion concerning women in certain sports back at home, particularly women’s rugby.

Some people still refer to the old tales of sexism in track and field, but most of those people died out 50 years ago, at least in this country, thanks to women like Maeve Kyle and Mary Peters and the success and achievements of women like Sonia O'Sullivan and Catherina McKiernan and Derval O'Rourke.

So when Britain's Jo Pavey won the 10,000 metres in Zurich, one month shy of turning 41, and 11 months after giving birth to her second child, Emily, we stood back in plain old admiration, not because she was a woman, or indeed the oldest woman to ever win a European gold medal; it was more because Pavey still found the time and motivation to run 100 miles every week, in and around her parenting duties, and was still able to maintain the body composition which should see her through to Rio, and her fifth Olympics.

We felt the same when Christelle Daunay, the 39-year-old from France, won the marathon in a championship record of 2:25.14, holding off 38-year-old mother of two Valerla Straneo from Italy. This was another performance of genuine athletic distinction, and anyone who disagrees has never run a marathon in 2:25.14.

On the final day, Antje Moldner-Schmidt from Germany won the women's 3,000m steeplechase, and the distinction there wasn't her time or her age, but the fact she'd taken two years out of the sport, after 2010, while undergoing treatment for lymph gland cancer.

Her medal ceremony was greeted with plain old admiration and that’s not pretending and definitely not patronising but simply because it’s true.

Throughout the week there were also large tracts of the Letzigrund Stadium fascinated by the emergence of Dafne Schippers, who at 22, matched the Dutch sprint double last achieved by Fanny Blankers-Koen, in 1950.

That fascination wasn’t manufactured, and no one was telling them whether they should care about Schippers: they simply recognisedher for what she was: a very exciting and talented young sprinter.

Achievement

Not that all women athletes have always had it this way: Maeve Kyle recalled just how far some of them had to come, when accepting a lifetime achievement award, at this newspaper’s Sportswoman of the Year awards in 2012.

Kyle helped pioneer women's advancement in sport on many levels, and became the first woman to represent Ireland at the Olympics, selected in both the 100m and 200m for Melbourne in 1956.

She has often told the story of how the news of her selection for Melbourne was greeted, perhaps best summarised, ironically enough, in a letter also printed in this newspaper.

"I was a disgrace to motherhood and the Irish nation," she said. "That's what one letter in The Irish Times said. Imagine! A woman leaving her husband and daughter to go and run!"

Truth is Kyle wasn’t ideally suited to the 200m, although she could only run that distance in 1956 because that was the farthest a woman was allowed to run on the track at the time.

As well as Melbourne, she also competed in the Rome Olympics in 1960 and in Tokyo in 1964, where she reached the semi-finals of both the 400m and 800m, her preferred distance.

Kyle’s first sporting love was actually hockey, where she gained 58 Irish caps, and she was equally deft at tennis, swimming, sailing and cricket. Later, with her husband and coach Seán, she co-founded the Ballymena and Antrim Athletic Club, originally designed as a women’s club, although they soon had men on board too.

That’s because Kyle wasn’t one for any sort of separatism, sporting or otherwise, and 50 years on can only be left wondering what all the recent fuss is about.

At least in athletics the women are applauded just like the men, with plain old admiration, or aren’t they?