Manager lays out programme needed for Olympic success

"Our target is Olympic gold," said Irish team manager Mick O'Callaghan yesterday, adding that the aim is to qualify four boats for the Games in Athens in 2004. "Let's get serious about Olympic gold," he adds later.

The Corkman used the unprecedented success of the Irish team at the World Championships here in Lucerne to lay out a programme which would involve greater funding from the Sports Council, the appointment of a national coach and a concentration on Olympic boat classes over the next three years.

But the gold medal-winning lightweight pair of Tony O'Connor and Gear≤id Towey remain to be convinced, and said that the structures in Ireland had little to do with the success of the three crews which won gold for the country, as all train abroad.

O'Connor and Towey said they would only see themselves at home in an Olympic boat such as the lightweight four in a radically-altered coaching structure which had the confidence of the athletes.

This is very much the crux of the matter: Ireland's winning boats, the lightweight pair and the women's and men's lightweight single, are non-Olympic class boats and while everyone here acknowledges these are world-class athletes, only Sinead Jennings has stated that she will certainly move out of a boat in which are the world's best to compete in an unproven one (the lightweight double) with the ultimate prize three years away - if it is won.

"I really want to go to the Olympics in the double. That's my dream - I will do everything in my power to make a double work," says the Donegal woman.

Her coach, Scotsman Hamish Burrell, is firmly behind her in this aim, and feels that Irish rowing can build on the success here to bring others up to the standard of the gold medallists.

Sam Lynch is more in sync with the present management than the pair, but kicks to touch on his participation in a men's lightweight double, saying it is too soon to make firm decisions. Following Jennings' lead, he says: "Ultimately, the Olympics is the goal for any athlete," but says "political" decisions may be part of the mix.

He concludes his comments on this on a positive note, however. "You have to weigh things up, balance it out for the good of the sport." O'Callaghan takes a bullish view: "We have one half of it," (in Jennings) he says of the women's lightweight double, adding that it is up to women who feel they can be the other half to be prepared to make the commitment soon.

Jennings is based in Scotland and the coaching of that crew may be done there, so the commitment may be a very serious one.

The other three boats O'Callaghan has in mind are the men's lightweight double, a lightweight four and a boat in the heavyweight class, although the actual class would still need to be worked out. The four can be built on the success of the very young lightweight four which won silver at the World under-23 Championships and gained further experience here.

Where does that leave our gold medal-winning pair? O'Callaghan would seem to have accepted that they may not be part of the picture and says that if a crew can win a gold medal in a non-Olympic boat they will still be backed. One of O'Connor's and Towey's main criticisms of the present structures is that the Irish Amateur Rowing Union has still failed to appoint a successor to former head coach Thor Nilsen, who left the job over two years ago.

Nilsen is a highly-esteemed Swedish coach who has trained Lynch for years off his own bat, and took on O'Connor and Towey in the run-up to these championships, doing much of the work in Spain.

The rowing union maintains until Sports Council funding comes through the head coach cannot be funded and a more comprehensive rolling out of a coaching programme cannot be implemented.

"I will be looking for Sports Council support," says O'Callaghan, who says that the union "supports" the outside coaching of the crews which won here at the weekend, but acknowledges there is a "coaching gap" at the moment. He points to Ireland's success at under-23 level as well as here. "All this is done on a shoestring. We will be looking for more money."

Towey and O'Connor believe it is more than about money, however. There is real pain in Towey's expression as he says he would love to return from his English base to Ireland; but both say they did not feel it would be right to come back and be part of a four formed only in the months before these championships. They knew they had potential as a pair and built on it.

This allegation of short-termism in the IARU has been levied by more than Towey and O'Connor, but O'Connor pulls no punches with a more comprehensive critique of where Irish rowing should go.

"In order to compete at the Olympic Games, and I have been at two Games (Atlanta and Sydney), we need four things: athletes willing to work; good coaching and management and funding," he says. "Then there is how you put the pieces of the jigsaw together." O'Connor says that if any one piece is not present the pieces will not fit.

"They weren't in place this year. That was the reason we decided to go in the pair." People are "doing it themselves" because the system hasn't been there, O'Connor asserts. Not just a head coach, but a new coaching system is needed. "I would gladly come back into a changed system," says Towey.