Big wins were elusive in 2023 but Ireland’s sportswomen consistently among the best

The racing driver Rosemary Smith died at the start of the month. It’s exactly a decade ago this week since she was Hall of Fame winner at The Irish Times Sportswoman of the Year awards, a do at which she held court magnificently when interviewed on stage by a suitably petrified Des Cahill. She was 76 by then and was enjoying herself immensely, noting that one of the monthly winners that year, the three-day eventer Aoife Clarke, was actually a student of hers at her driving school.

They can be stilted sometimes, these set-piece awards-lunch interviews. If sportspeople in general are often a bit leery about reliving past glories, you can double that and even triple it when you get to the female side of the house. Aggressive modesty tends to be the order of the day, an almost belligerent humility radiating out from the stage.

Smith was having none of that in December 2013. Instead, she was positively magisterial in giving a pep talk to everyone in the audience, placing particular emphasis on the stone cold joy she took in winning. You wanted to punch the air by the end of it.

“Of course you need talent and you need determination to succeed in sport,” she said at one point. “But this idea that you don’t have to win all the time, and so on. [Here, she shook her head and scrunched her face]. You’re all going out to win. I went out to win. I loved the sport, loved doing what I did, but I also went out to win. I used to get given out to for that. You’re not meant to say that.”

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Sport has a way of saying the unsayable for you, of course. Run your finger down through the books for Irish sportswomen in 2024 and the rough facts don’t be long bumping up against you. This was one of those years where there was no big bang. Where the wins that so jazzed Rosemary Smith were, in a lot of cases, stubbornly elusive.

The Ireland soccer team went to the World Cup and didn’t win a game. Ciara Mageean and Rhasidat Adeleke went to the World Championships and both finished a place outside the medals. Rachael Blackmore went to Cheltenham and only won two races. Leona Maguire only won one tournament. Even Katie Taylor tasted defeat for the first time in her professional career.

Siobhán McCrohan won a World Championship gold medal in rowing after seven years away from the sport. Is that a higher peak on the mountain range than the fourth places of Mageean and Adeleke? How deep do you reckon the pool of world-class lightweight single scullers goes? As deep as that of world-class 400m sprinters? Or world-class 1,500m runners?

Stop, before your brain starts leaking out your ear.

As ever, it’s generally a pointless exercise trying to throw a blanket over it all and start examining it for a pattern. So many disparate sportspeople, such a wide spectrum of sports, all with their own contexts and demands and parameters for success. Sports media is the only place you find this kind of stuff and we’re nobody’s idea of a good time.

Here’s a thing, though. A sign of the changing times. Go back a decade and, had we been writing this self same review, chances are the language would have been very different. It’s entirely likely that the paragraph detailing the type of year those women had would have gone something like the following…

It was the year when the Ireland soccer team took their place on the global stage with a first ever appearance at the World Cup. When Ciara Mageean and Rhasidat Adeleke broke every Irish record going and came within a fingernail of Ireland’s first track medals in three decades. When Rachael Blackmore brought the house down at Cheltenham not once but twice. When Leona Maguire shot a final-round 64 to win her second LPGA Tour title. When Katie Taylor looked into the abyss and came back stronger than ever.

None of that is a lie. None of it is even gilding the lily really. The distance between the two paragraphs is the distance Irish sportswomen have dragged our expectations of them in a very short space of time. In the rush to treat their achievements with due respect, there is always the possibility that we can overdo the belts-and-braces bit. Too much f**king perspective, as the Spinal Tap lads would say.

So let’s not be stingy here. This generation of Irish sportswomen are unparalleled in what they have done, in what they consistently aim to do and, maybe most significantly, what they mean to people along the way. For an example of what we mean, look no further than Katie McCabe.

Here’s a small story that might mean nothing or it might mean a lot. In the run-up to Christmas our GAA club ran a table quiz for our 2015 girls group. For one of the questions in the sports round, we asked them to name the captain of the Ireland women’s soccer team. Sixteen tables, 16 correct answers.

To reiterate, we are talking about eight-year-old girls here. This year marked the 50th anniversary of the first Ireland women’s soccer international match. For how many of those years would you reckon that a room of eight-year-old girls would have had the first clue of the name of the captain of the national team? If it’s more than one, it’s almost certainly fewer than three.

These are the leaps and bounds that have become a matter of course. Katie McCabe was unimaginable in the public consciousness until she wasn’t. Women’s soccer is mushrooming across the world and there she is at the vanguard of it, a crowd-pleasing, defender-teasing tornado, all lightning feet and long-range bangers. Gobbled up by the TikTok crowd just as much as she is purred over by the purists.

What did she win in 2023? Nothing by way of cups or medals, as it happens. Ireland topped their Nations League group after they came home from the World Cup – again, not an occurrence that would have been dismissed at any point in their history up to now but one that feels a little diminished by how easy they found it. Arsenal went out of the Champions League at the semi-final stage. McCabe was the only non-finalist to make the team of the tournament.

And maybe that’s the best way to sum up what 2023 amounted to for Ireland’s leading sportswomen. Whether it’s McCabe or Taylor, whether it’s Maguire or Blackmore or Kellie Harrington or Aoife O’Rourke. Whether it’s Mageean or Adeleke or Sarah Lavin in athletics. Or Hannah Tyrrell and Amy O’Connor or Katie-George Dunleavy.

Everywhere you look, you see that the base level of performance for Irish sportswomen is consistently so much higher than was ever expected before. Where once we relied on a Sonia or a Derval or a Katie to arrive plonked in a basket on the porch every few years, now consistent high performance is just always there. In the background, like wallpaper.

Rosemary Smith would be damn proud of what came after her.