Time for a change of track
Kenneth Egan poses with his medal
AS a public we can start to educate ourselves properly or keep whinging platitudes on 'Liveline', but whatever happens next, Irish sport doesn't need another glossy report from some overpaid consultancy to learn some valuable lessons from Beijing.
First the good stuff.
We now have a world-class boxing system, powered by a couple of really classy, intelligent men, off whom the Russians are now cogging!
That's no coincidence because boxing, a sport hard-wired to the Irish DNA, has now provided us with 12 of our 23 Olympic medals and can be honed in Spartan facilities which can actually be an asset, not a liability.
By some dint of their own extraordinary commitment and talent, we also have two world-class race-walkers and the fastest man in Athenry, who is also the 'fastest white man in the world'.
We have a slalom canoeist who achieved an Olympic fourth place while being the aquatic equivalent of Jamaican bobsledders.
We had the unprecedented sight of a male Irish swimmer (Andrew Bree) only missing an Olympic final by four places.
We clearly have equestrian talent (eighth in eventing and a potential medalist in show jumping until that all went dope-shaped). The sailors are improving but consistency is a big issue for both sports.
And the Keane-esque Chloe Magee, who wasn't afraid to take on the Asians in badminton, is certainly one to nurture for London 2012.
The negatives?
Four of our 15 track and field qualifiers struggled badly with injury beforehand and all underperformed so badly that they got slated.
Sketchy
They might even have been better advised by Athletics Ireland and people like the departing director of athletics Max Jones -- they're already advertising for a replacement - to pull out, given the public's generally sketchy understanding of their sport.
Only 13 Irish athletes (including Sonia O'Sullivan, Eamonn Coghlan and John Treacy) have made top eight in the Olympics yet somehow people think we should be able to eyeball Usain Bolt and Kenenisa Bekele and nick a few medals.
The fact that eight Irish made top 16 at the World Championships last year skewed the graph, but a year is a long time in track and field.
The sport has a much higher attrition rate than most -- witness the soap-opera withdrawal of the Shanghai Bullet Liu Xiang -- so for the likes of Eileen O'Keeffe, Derval O'Rourke and Joanne Cuddihy, if not others, there were mitigating circumstances.
We also seem to have a well-funded rowing programme which, after years of relative success, has hit stormy waters for the second consecutive Olympics and about which some serious questions will now be asked.
Our cyclists didn't exactly shine but, on the road at least, they had the consolation that one third of the field, including Giro' winner Alberto Contador and pre-race favourite Stefan Schumacher couldn't even finish the race.
And Longford shooter Derek Burnett, seventh in Athens, mis-fired badly after such high expectations. He actually only missed 15 clays out of 125 but that left him 29th of 35 competitors.
So what are our options?
Well for one we should stop making the track and field team -- already riddled with self-doubt in a sport that is accelerating faster than the drug testers can keep up -- the scapegoats.
America won 14 gold medals at last year's World T&F Championships but only seven here while Jamaica, Russia and Ethiopia improved their performances. Greece won one medal here, a bronze in triple jump. Go figure.
Sweden, who dominated the last European Championships, won nothing in Bejing. France? One silver (steeplechase).
Unlike an All-Ireland final, if you're having a bad day/week/year in an individual sport, there are no team-mates there to cloak your form. Kenyan-American Bernard Lagat, a double world champion last year at 1,500m/5,000m, couldn't even qualify for the 1,500m here and finished ninth in the 5,000m final.
Athletics Ireland clearly needs to urgently review its injury-management processes and also the mental preparation of its teams.
But it would help if we had some decent indoor training facilities around the country. Eleven of our 15 track and field Olympians have to train abroad, which really doesn't help motivation or the recruitment of raw talent, which is inevitably lost to team sport.
Poland have an athletics tradition that dwarfs ours. They had a 32-strong team here and won just two medals, one in discus.
And really, if it's medals Ireland craves, we should change tack altogether and look to minority sports because everyone else is. Poland's 10 medals ranged from canoeing, mountain-biking, fencing and rowing to gymnastics.
The odds of winning a slalom canoe medal from an Olympic field of 21 are clearly a lot better than from a 200m field of 63.
Ten years after failing to win one medal at the World Track Cycling Championships, Britain ploughed money into the sport on the basis that it was a medal orchard waiting to be thieved.
Of their 47 medals in Beijing, 12 (seven gold) were in track cycling and just four in athletics.
Australia's seminal Institute of Sport, with its space-age aquatic centre, churned out 20 swim medals but their only athletics gold was in pole vault, a technical event.
We will always need more money. We spent €30m on Olympic/Paralympic sport in the last four years but Britain spent €5m alone on track cycling.
The maximum individual annual grant we give our athletes is €40,000 ('contracted') and just two Beijing Olympians -- Kenneth Egan (surprise, surprise) and Derval O'Rourke -- got that much last year, with the rowers next on €30,000.
Robert Heffernan gets €20,000 for being 'world class'. To make the great jump to the next level ('contracted') you have to win a major medal.
And what is the alternative anyway?
To do like the Chinese, who poured billions into 'Project 119', which yielded 100 medals in this latest track-suited version of the 'Long March'.
They have clearly hot-housed youngsters for a decade to produce this success, but at what cost?
Children are put into sports boarding schools from 11 years of age and only see their families a couple of times a year.
Last Sunday, the state's 'China Daily' English language newspaper, which spewed out a happy image of a smiling nation throughout the Games, showed a photo of what appeared to be kids little older than toddlers in nappies practising the parallel bars who did not look like they were having much fun.
When 25m pistol shooter Chen Ying won one of China's first medals she rang her mother who immediately confessed that she had already had four doses of chemotherapy for breast cancer but had kept it secret so as not to disturb her daughter's Olympic preparations.
There was a recurring trend of Chinese athletes bursting into tears after medalling because they would now see their loved ones, indicating lengthy confinements in training that were not humane.
And the theme of 'unknown Chinese athlete wins medal' was even more sinister.
The young man who finished fourth in Heffernan's race was only competing in his second international ever.
China had a 19-year-old weightlifter who had never before competed in an international event, yet won Olympic gold in his first.
If that is what sporting dominance is about, wouldn't we rather stay as we are -- ranked joint 51st on the 81-nation medals table (with Austria and Serbia) -- occasionally astounded by individual brilliance (Hession) and systematic excellence (the boxers), but with healthy, happy athletes and clear consciences?
- Cliona Foley Beijing review
