Running on empty

But examine the quotes and it is difficult to see where he made the distinction, if it was his intention to do so. He was interviewed privately by the Irish Independent but when Hickey spoke to the general press he repeated his criticisms, though nobody asked him about sailing. In his public discourse nothing that Hickey says is random or unconsidered.

The background is clear. Four years ago the sailing federation was one of the prime movers against Hickey when the OCI elections came round. Sailing’s nominee, Richard Burrows, was Hickey’s only rival for the presidency. The Olympic charter obliges every national Olympic committee to hold elections within a year of each Games and on Monday Hickey fired the first shot in his re-election campaign.

When Hickey highlighted sailing’s massive funding and condemned them for their failure to deliver a medal over the past three Olympic Games he was speaking directly to his constituency. He wondered aloud about the inequities in the system; about what the small federations could do with some of the money being poured into sailing’s coffers.

Over the years Hickey has carefully cultivated the small federations as his fiefdom and their loyalty has underpinned his power. The message from Hickey has always been that their voice will be heard, their needs championed, as long as he’s in charge.

Hickey’s attack on the sailing federation, however, was groundless. Within the Irish Sports Council (ISC) sailing is regarded as the best managed, most progressive of all the federations. They were the first to appoint a high-performance director, Garrett Connolly, and in Paddy Boyd they have one of the brightest sports administrators in the system.

Yet none of this elevated them above the Irish underachievement of the past 16 days. That was the killing thing. Politically the ISC needed a big performance from sailing more than any other discipline because then they could hold sailing up as the model federation they believe them to be. To those who are resisting change they could say: look at what sailing have achieved, this is the way forward.

Ireland qualified six boats for the Games and their nine-strong team was the largest that sailing had ever sent to the Olympics, but the team wasn’t as deep as it was long. After his bronze at the world championships this year, David Burrows was their only real medal hope and it just didn’t happen for him. Ninth in Sydney four years ago, he failed to make the top 10 here.

Mark Mansfield came into his fourth Olympics ranked in the world’s top five with his crewman Killian Collins, but he had never fulfilled his potential at the Games and he couldn’t do it on his final appearance either. Because of a season dogged by injury and illness, hopes for Maria Coleman were modest and unrealised. None of the others was fancied and there were no surprises. None of the six Irish boats finished in the top 10.

For a federation that had done everything right it was a kick in the guts. Their performance simply reflected the greater Irish experience and amplified the questions. Should Ireland have done better? Why didn’t Ireland do better? How can Ireland do better?

IN ALL of the hand-wringing and finger-pointing of the past couple of weeks some context has been lost. The reality is that Ireland has always been a marginal nation at the Olympics. Beaten down. Defeated. Between Rome in 1960 and Montreal in 1976 Ireland’s medal haul was a solitary bronze from Tokyo in 1964. Since Moscow in 1980 Ireland’s highest finish on the medals table was 28th in Atlanta, a position artificially inflated by the three golds and one bronze won by the drugs cheat Michelle Smith. In Seoul Ireland’s best finish was eighth.

Sonia O’Sullivan’s silver medal in Sydney put Ireland at 64th of the 80 countries who won a medal. When the table was adjusted to reflect medals per head of population Ireland made the small jump to 51st.

The Sydney Review commissioned by the government after the shambles of Ireland’s performance at the 2000 Olympics put it plainly: “The chart clearly shows consistent under-performance by the Irish team relative to other countries. This situation has been in existence for some considerable time.”

There are reasons and there are excuses. Ireland’s smallness is often used as a reason but it can’t be touted as an absolving excuse. In the Sydney Review performance comparisons were made with six nations whose population was roughly equivalent to Ireland’s. At 3.8 million New Zealand was closest of all in terms of size and their results left Ireland standing: one gold and three bronze medals put them at 23rd in the Sydney rankings. Two golds and three silvers in Athens leaves them in the top 20.

Behind it all there are conflicting realities. One is that Ireland can do better and the other is that the margins are incredibly tight. How many world-class Olympic competitors are we ever likely to produce in a generation? It was widely accepted before these Games that Ireland had less than a handful of real medal chances. Gillian O’Sullivan, the rowers Sam Lynch and Gearóid Towey, Burrows and the showjumpers. That was it. There were no other medal hopes. Of those, O’ Sullivan didn’t make it to the start line and Lynch and Towey got there in a weakened state.

What was disappointing, though, was the manner in which some of the Irish team failed. Clearly, there were Irish competitors unable to cope, overpowered by the sudden realisation of where they were. The swimmer Emma Robinson crumbled in her heat of the 100m breaststroke. “I tried to stay relaxed,” she said, “but I felt my arms in the second 50 and they were shaking. I never felt that before.”

The three-day eventer Niall Griffin performed with distinction but not without a struggle. “The actual competition itself is not harder,” he says, “but there’s a mental job going on. You try to keep telling yourself that it’s just another competition but it’s not just another competition and your mind keeps doing that to you.”

Adrian O’Dwyer folded but it is easy to condemn and it takes only a little compassion to understand. Brendan Hackett is a sports psychologist who has been to three Olympics and has worked with almost half of this Irish team across six different sports. He paints a picture of what O’Dwyer was facing.

“You come to the Olympics and your whole routine is changed. You spend three weeks in a training camp in Cyprus and then you go into the athletes’ village and it’s like being dropped into a place the size of Tallaght. You have thousands of people all cooped up together and all you can do in the evenings is watch DVDs. Then his coach Maeve (Kyle) wasn’t able to come because she had a health problem.

“Adrian is only 20 and had only ever been to small meets but now you get to an Olympics where you must do your warm-up an hour and a half before you compete and spend an hour in a call-room waiting to go out.”

There is no doubt that O’Dwyer is talented. The challenge for the system is to get him to the next major championships, the next Olympics, in a position to deliver an optimum performance. His best jump this season was 2.30m; in the high jump final a jump of 2.29m was good enough to finish seventh. But the tension and the pressure of that final was extraordinary and five of the top seven produced either a season’s best or a personal best under those conditions. That’s the leap O’Dwyer must make.

Apart from Alastair Cragg the track and field performances were poor but who can claim to be surprised? “I would have formed a view at an early stage that we weren’t going to do much better than we actually did,” says Patsy McGonigle, vice-president of the Athletics Association of Ireland (AAI). “I’m disappointed but it’s not a shock to me.”

Why should it be? Three of the Irish athletes, Derval O’Rourke, Paul Brizzel and James Nolan, achieved their qualifying standard last year — in Nolan’s case only when the qualifying standard was eased — and all of them have struggled with their form this season.

There is an argument that none of them should have been sent despite achieving the A standard but such hard calls have never been made in the picking of Irish Olympic teams. There has always been a view that becoming an Olympian was an achievement in itself and there was huge tolerance in the system for that. After these Games that tolerance is certain to be eroded.

In his 200m heat Brizzel ran a season’s best of 21.0 but that was 0.39 of a second slower than Paul Hession’s best time of the year and Hession missed out on the A qualifying standard by just 0.02 of a second. If the OCI had the wisdom, as their British counterparts had, to send athletes with the B standard in exceptional cases, Hession would have had every chance of progressing beyond the first round. A repeat of his best time would have been enough to escape five of the seven first-round heats; Brizzel’s time wouldn’t have been sufficient in any of the heats.

Because of the nakedly frank comments of the RTE panel, Nolan has been a lightning rod for much of the bad feeling about the Irish Olympic performance. His personality — no more than Jerry Kiernan’s — wouldn’t make him universally popular in the little village of Irish athletics. But there is some sympathy for him too.

He endured a bad experience in Sydney and those who know him said he bottled it up. Wouldn’t talk about it, wouldn’t release it and inside it was eating away at him. He went to Edmonton a year later for the world championships, ran a headless race and came nowhere. For the next couple of years he just drifted; not exceptionally talented, but good enough to do better.

At these Games the bad experience exploded in anger as soon as his semi-final was over. We can only guess how long it will take for him to process this experience and separate the goodness from the waste.

For so much of the heat to be directed at him, though, was cruel and unfair. “I feel sorry for him,” says McGonigle. “He would have needed that lashing but he wouldn’t have needed it in public.”

And then there was Sonia. Because it was her, we reserved a tiny place in our minds to accommodate the thought that maybe what she was attempting in the 5,000m wasn’t impossible. Coldly, clearly, it was.

Take out the 37-year-old Edith Masai, who didn’t finish the race, and O’Sullivan was running against a field whose average age was 25; O’Sullivan will be 35 in November and at the final crossroads.

She said that this was her last Olympic race “on the track”; with that qualification and without dwelling on other possibilities she refused to close the door on the Olympics. Which only leaves the marathon. Who knows? We don’t expect her retirement soon. Whenever it pleases her, though, she will go with all the gratitude in our hearts.

SO WHAT happens next? The Sydney Review focused on the work of the ISC, the OCI, the government department and their various relationships. The Athens Review, however, will take a hard look at the federations. “We’re not going to stand over bad practice or mistakes,” says one ISC source. “That’s what the review will be about. Are we getting the best value for our money? Are we getting the best coaching? We don’t want to be in this position every four years.”

All of the federations will come under scrutiny, including major federations such as the AAI. For sure they will be asked to explain why their high-performance manager, Elaine Fitzpatrick, wasn’t accredited, forcing her to buy tickets for the stadium on the nights Irish athletes competed. Another question will be why, six years after the Deloitte & Touche report into Irish athletics, a chief executive still hasn’t been appointed, despite this being a key recommendation of the report.

As a sport, track and field knows that it’s being pushed more and more towards the margins; honest responses to awkward questions now is the only way that change can happen and without change athletics in Ireland has no viable future as a major Olympic sport. McGonigle has no problem saying that all of the outstanding athletes have come along by accident, not as a result of any enlightened system.

The ISC know the value of identifying and hot-housing real talent. They will do everything in their power to persuade Andy Lee to remain in amateur boxing but it won’t be easy. In recent weeks five leading Irish amateurs either turned professional or indicated their intention to do so. Lee has already had overtures from the professional game and the temptation may be impossible to resist. Under the International Carding Scheme Lee’s bronze medal at the European Championships this year will qualify him for the maximum grant next year, but at current rates that amounts to just €30,000. This year just seven Irish sportspeople have qualified for that grant. At the other end of the scale the sprinter Paul Brizzel has averaged a little more than €11,000 a year over the past three years. Think of the comparisons. Damien Duff earns £70,000 a week at Chelsea. People who have felt empowered to ridicule the performance of Irish athletes this month because they are in receipt of state funding need to remember the figures. These people put their lives, their careers, their relationships on hold to pursue a dream, which in all likelihood will be crushed.

And still, there will be a team in four years’ time, populated with people who will merge into the shadows now and embrace the solitude of the long road. Not expecting the concern of those who are interested in the Olympics for just two weeks every four years. Cian O’Connor’s gold medal will be sufficient justification for the journey they have undertaken; and without O’Connor they would have found some other validation of the dream. Why? After the defeat of the lightweight four last Sunday morning Niall O’Toole put it best: “750 or 1,000 metres out you look around, you’re in a medal position and you say to yourself, ‘I’ve two minutes to change my life for ever.’” O’Connor’s gold medal was a balm on the fever of the past two weeks. But it is not the cure. The hard questions are waiting.