On the basis that it's easy to dig up a ploughed field, this week I will be mostly writing about the Olympics and athletics. This is because one of the many things for which the GAA is apparently to blame is the difficulty experienced by Team Ireland in winning medals.

The argument runs that football and hurling soak up athletic talent and so drain the pool for track and field. Maybe it's true but you'd expect the type of outstanding talent that wins medals to surface at some stage rather than remain hidden from view, forever chasing footballs and sliotars despite an insistent sense that they were destined for greater - or at least different - things.

Then again maybe not. The above view is held by, among others, Patsy McGonagle, who as a coach and manager has intimate knowledge of both athletics and Gaelic games. But we're not the only country where the sporting landscape is dominated by field games. New Zealand, a country of comparable population, has rugby as its national game and yet has registered major improvement in its Olympic performances. Australia has footy and rugby not to mention the national game, cricket, yet has revolutionised its achievements in recent Olympics.

In other words, Ireland's problem might be elsewhere, like in the lack of a coherent strategy to identify sporting aptitudes at an early age and help children develop talents that currently go undetected. Without the GAA it's likely far more children would be flopped in front of a Playstation or X-Box and athletics would suffer even more.

The connection between the sports isn't new because originally the GAA was established, at least partly, to wrest control of Irish athletics from the British influence of the existing clubs. The association's first two years were dedicated to the twin objectives of persuading athletics clubs to come under the GAA umbrella and reviving hurling and (codifying) football.

Early controversies concerning the association were more to do with politics in general and the resistance to change of the established authorities than with the revival of the games that now dominate its activities. In fact it was the GAA that sent the first representative Irish team of track and field athletes abroad. Known widely as the "American Invasion", that excursion took place in 1888 and was responsible for the only blank date in the All-Ireland roll of honour, as the association all but decamped in its entirety.

Largely the brainchild of the association's first president, Maurice Davin, the idea was that by sending a team of athletes and hurlers to the US the GAA could enhance relations with the large Irish-American community and raise substantial revenue from a series of exhibitions and fund-raising events. This would underwrite Davin's dream of a Celtic festival, the re-establishment of the Tailteann Games.

In the end it went the way of many wacky fund-raising ideas and lost money, leaving the invaders in need of a dig-out for the fares home.

In a way the GAA was too successful. The indigenous games blossomed and control over athletics was substantially established. But the latter began to suffer as the former thrived.

Back in 1895 Central Council considered sending another team abroad. The association's Athletics Council suggested attending the upcoming, inaugural Olympic Games in Paris. But somehow the idea got shelved.

So marginalised had the athletics function become by the early 20th century that a pressure group of southern athletes had been established. The Munster Athletes Protection Association's two priorities were athletes' representation and decentralisation of the sport's administration.

They also aspired to Olympic participation and targeted the 1916 Games, intended for Berlin but never staged because of the first World War. Such aspirations were almost certainly doomed anyway, given home-based Irish athletes were recognised only as part of the British delegation or, as with some emigrants, the USA team.

Eventually, seeing the importance of athletics in projecting a separate Irish identity on the global stage and the consequent need for an independent organisation to affiliate to international bodies, Central Council voted to relinquish its control of what Marcus de Búrca's definitive GAA history terms "the Cinderella of the association".

The new body to run athletics was known as the National Athletics and Cycling Association and its establishment was followed by the dissolution of the old Irish Amateur Athletics Association, which had originally fought the GAA for - but later co-operated with it in - the administration of the sport.

Ironically, this had happened, in May 1922, by the time two of the most significant international events in athletics history took place.

The Tailteann Games were eventually held, having been postponed for the Civil War, in 1924. They were seen as creating a positive image for the infant Free State and got Government funding - £10,000, which turned out nearly 50 per cent short of cost - to build the original Hogan Stand.

The Games attracted many athletes from abroad, who used the event as part of their build-up to the Paris Olympics of the same year. Those Games were the first at which Ireland was represented as an independent state.

It is ironic that athletics, the sport the GAA let go in order that it might thrive internationally, is now said to be suffering because the association so successfully developed its own games.

Finally it is worth noting the present tendency to dismiss athletic effort that doesn't win medals resonates harshly with the real achievement of the GAA: the development of recreational outlets for children and adults and the fostering of community values. That historically has been a success that doesn't depend for validation on medals tables.