National Rowing Centre facilities proving a really worthwhile investment

ROWING:THE CHANGES in Ireland's international programme since the last Olympiad will be on view for all to see at the National Rowing Centre at Farran Wood in Cork this weekend.

In the run-up to the last Olympics a small group travelled to camps in Switzerland and other foreign venues to guarantee good weather: this weekend 20 elite athletes who are on a 10-day camp at Inniscarra Lake will be joined by 46 others – including a big group of juniors.

The programme is set to continue even if the weather deteriorates, as the National Rowing Centre now has a purpose-built gymnasium and a big collection of ergometers (rowing machines). A chef has been employed for the 10 days and athletes will be given three meals a day.

The performance director of Irish rowing, Martin McElroy, says they are spending “considerably less” than what was spent under previous regimes. “What’s going on here at the moment in the past would have been run somewhere else and would have been 10 times the cost. Ten times the cost for probably a third of the people.”

Most of the cream of the crop of the last Olympiad have dropped away, with Paul Griffin, Seán Casey, Seán O’Neill (now campaigning with success in New Zealand) noticeable absentees in a system which is backboned by under-23 athletes.

The 2010 season brought no medals at the senior World Championships but the Irish lightweight quadruple scull of Michael Maher, Justin Ryan, Niall Kenny and Mark O’Donovan took silver at the World Under-23 Championships. They were deservedly named the Afloat Rowers of the Year.

Other major highlights of the year included: the rise and rise of Claire Lambe (20) and Siobhán McCrohan (23) at international level; bronze at the World University Championships for an Irish eight; gold for John Keohane at the World Coastal Championships; victories at Henley Royal Regatta for UCD and at Women’s Henley for Neptune’s Claire Ludlow and Elaine Fitzgerald; a revamped domestic season crowned by NUIG’s dramatic win in the senior eights in July.

The sport continues to struggle with its profile, however. Rowing Ireland is running an open discussion forum on Sunday, January 16th, at Neptune in Dublin. It follows a similar event in Galway.

Rowing could certainly do with better publicity at a national level.

A welcome development is the release of an attractive newsletter which was released online last month. Less impressive is the Rowing Ireland publicity machine. A press release recently informed the public that Colm Wilkinson (!) would be competing at the Indoor Rowing Championships.

- A good news story for rowing fans: Sinead Jennings and Sam Lynch have a new daughter, Clodagh. With both parents having won world championships there’s no pressure on this little one athletically!

- Rowing is a broad church, and for me one of 2010’s memorable moments came at the Robert Northridge appreciation function in Enniskillen. The rowing enthusiast, a force for peace in his town, was stepping down after decades as a teacher at Portora Royal School. The night was filled with great stories, most jolly, some sad.

Northridge told of a day, during the Troubles, when he was way out on the lake on a boat with a group of boys. They heard a distant boom. The exploding bomb, he later learnt, killed the father of a pupil at the school.

Not everything in this country is worse now than it used to be. Happy New Year to all.