THREE issues have emerged over the last couple of weeks which, on the face it, appear unrelated. The GAA’s funding for the GPA was signed off, Dublin’s proposed Friday night fixture with Mayo in Croke Park was spiked and an unnamed Kerry player was detained for three hours after training until he passed a urine sample for a drugs tester. This is the link: in different ways each story generated a fuss caused by the GAA’s awkward relationship with the very concept of elite players within their ranks.
The word elite is repulsive to vast constituencies within the association. Elitism is somehow seen as the opposite of volunteerism and the opposite of amateurism, the twin tenets of the faith. What these people fail to understand or will not accept is that elitism has always been part of the GAA. It is intrinsic to competitive sport.
Take the GPA funding agreement, for example. A figure of €8.75m has been pledged to the GPA over the next five years to underwrite, among other things, a benevolent scheme for current players and past players who have fallen on hard times. Each case will be assessed and a ceiling of €3,000 has been set for any individual payout.
Because the GPA’s membership is mostly inter-county players this is the group which will benefit most from the scheme. However, think for a second what used to happen. For generations before the Celtic Tiger, county boards looked after inter-county players who were out of work. It was done on an ad hoc basis, depending on your value to the team. Bluntly, that was it.
This service wasn’t openly declared but it was accepted practice, particularly in successful counties: your county needs you, we’ll sort you out. Was that not elitist? Is the GPA system not fairer and more comprehensive?
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One of the complaints in clubs around the country in recent weeks is that this money is being made available to the GPA at a time when the GAA has severely reduced its injury cover for ordinary club players. At the beginning of 2009 clubs were informed that physiotherapy would only be covered in post-operative cases.
Physiotherapy cover for all injuries had been a massive drain on the system and clearly it was being abused. A certain proportion of club players who picked up knocks playing other sports were colluding with their GAA clubs to have claims processed under the GAA scheme.
The GAA’s injury scheme was not underwritten by a commercial insurance company: it was funded entirely from the GAA’s coffers. So the gate receipts generated by ordinary GAA members was being recycled to cover a certain amount of bogus claims. Was that sustainable? Was that more desirable than the GPA scheme? Clubs knew it was going on, players knew they could get away with it. How did that widespread low-level fraud sit with amateurism or volunteerism?
The issues with the drugs test and the Friday night match come back to the perceived conflict between the concepts of amateurism and elitism. They are not incompatible or mutually exclusive. How can they be? Inter-county players are, by definition, elite because they compete at the highest level and because they structure their lives around their desire to be elite athletes.
In elite sport all over the world doping or at least the threat of doping is a fact of life. The GAA originally objected to the idea of drug-testing but that resistance was overcome and it became a condition of sports council funding.
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Hanging around until after midnight to give a urine sample was a hugely regrettable experience for the Kerry player during the week but it shouldn’t bring the principle of drugs tests for inter-county players into question. Inter-county football and hurling are too serious for this issue to be taken lightly.
When the GAA knocked back Dublin’s request to play their league game against Mayo in Croke Park on Friday night the issue raised was compensation for lost hours in work. In the interests of so-called amateurism the GAA wouldn’t entertain such claims.
Why should it? Week-long overseas training camps or long weekends closer to home have been a feature of inter-county training for years. Players take holidays or come to some other arrangement with their employers. They find the time. In this case Mayo players would have been looking for a half-day. In normal life people often take half-days off.
Asking them to take a half-day to play for Mayo in Croke Park before a big crowd on Friday night would not have been a hardship. It would not have been a violation of their amateur status. They are elite athletes. They expect to make sacrifices. It’s what makes them different. We shouldn’t be suspicious of that. We should celebrate it.