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Unsung heroes

February 17, 2011

By Staff Reporter

We accept athletics is a minority interest at this point and the European Indoors isn’t exactly the ne plus ultra of the sport but there was still so much to admire about O’Rourke battling back from adversity and reminding us about the size of her talent. What makes it a story especially befitting the current national economic circumstance is that she’s competing with the world’s best even though many of them hail from countries that look after their athletes so much more. This is why her achievement is worth measuring against that of the rugby team.
Without denigrating Brian O’Driscoll and the rest of them, they are a squad of highly-paid professionals with the finest support network and infrastructure available to them at all times. All they have to worry about on any given day is finding their form when it matters most. Everything else is taken care of. Everything is in place to try to ensure they can produce on the biggest stage. And rightly so too. This, after all, is what the Cork hurlers are also campaigning for in their corner of the sporting universe.
O’Rourke also has some gifted professionals working with her but she, and all the other Irish athletes, still exist in a different world to so many of their contemporaries. On Saturday morning, the Corkwoman’s beaming face was all over the papers yet a visit to her website indicated that the only sponsors in her corner are Asics (who look after the Irish team’s kit) and the Irish Sports Council. She had other sponsors. They pulled out at Christmas. O’Rourke’s decline in form since 2006 and the planetary descent into recession over the past few months meant she was no longer a viable entity.
That’s fair enough. That’s the way capitalism works. The thing is though that long after the sponsors have moved on to the new flavor of the sporting month, we still expect the likes of O’Rourke to turn up at major championships every couple of years and to do something. A bronze. A gold. It doesn’t matter what color as long as there’s a medal of some sort, a bauble that will make us feel good about Ireland’s sporting heritage. The type of occasional feat that allows us to boast that we are a nation that punches above its weight, producing more stars than we reasonably should. Sure look at the McIlroy fella in the golf etc…
Those kind of opinions are best delivered from a bar stool because, really, we do very little to support these runners. Their misfortune is to be involved in an unglamorous sport that – apart from when somebody like O’Rourke does something special – only strays to the front of our consciousness in and around the Olympics. The days when Sonia’s races were appointment television back in the nineties may well go down as the last era when the ordinary sports fan actually cared a jot about athletics on a consistent basis. Yet, Sonia’s successors, and O’Rourke is the best Irish female athlete of her generation – are still out there carrying the flag.
“I’ve now got a gold, silver and bronze from three major championships,” said O’Rourke in Turin last Friday. “After two years that have been tortuous at times, and extremely difficult, and dark, no, I can’t be disappointed. There were times when you think ‘My God, was 2006 a fluke? Do I know how to nail this?’ This proves I can. The only championships I don’t have medals now are World outdoors, and Olympic Games. That’s a nice target for the next five years. Hopefully I can go now and make the final at the World Championships in Berlin.”
Given that many experts believe hurdlers don’t reach their peak until between the ages of 28 and 33, O’Rourke’s best days may be ahead. However, there’s no question that the road to London in 2012 will be a lot easier to negotiate if she has a few more sponsors smoothing her path. Even in a chastened climate like this one, there must be companies out there willing to invest in this kind of sporting success. And anybody doubting how much money is needed to help elite athletes fulfill their goal need only look at the American example.
In the wake of winning just 23 track and field medals in Beijing, the United States held an inquiry to investigate what went wrong in China and what needed to change ahead of the London Olympics. Among the recommendations made by a Task Force headed up by Carl Lewis was the introduction of serious financial incentives. These included rewarding every personal or seasonal best with a cheque for several thousand dollars. Given that just one Irish runner managed a personal best at the last Olympics, this might be something we need to consider.
“Athletes will be incentivised to chase the reward money and make good decisions,” wrote Lewis and his colleagues, “even if they do not medal; the financial incentive becomes an athlete-development program in and of itself.”
O’Rourke has never sounded like somebody who runs for the money. No Irish athlete could possibly be accused of that because the chances they’ll ever make any from their chosen sport are so slim. But, like those women with whom she’s competing on the world stage, she surely needs a little more of it to help her achieve her ultimate goals.

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