Towey stresses need for full-time coach

World champion oarsman Gear≤id Towey yesterday said that Irish rowing needs to appoint a full-time coach and manager if the talent that won three golds at the recent World Championships is to be properly harnessed in the future.

Towey, relaxing in Cork after returning from Lucerne where he and Tony O'Connor won gold in the lightweight pair, said that there is widespread dissatisfaction among rowers at what they see as the ad hoc structures in the sport here.

He said oarsmen and women need programmes laid out well in advance, with known targets and qualification levels. Towey cited Britain, where the sport is "run like a business", and the smaller case of Denmark as the examples the Irish might follow.

The 24-year-old Fermoy man said the pair which went on the win gold in Lucerne last weekend was being asked to come back from their base in Britain to help form a four as late as May of this year, because it was an Olympic boat, and that this was "ridiculous".

He added that it was important that the Irish Amateur Rowing Union received sufficient funding from the Sports Council to run the sport in the right way.

On this point, at least, Towey is singing from the same songbook as team manager Mick O'Callaghan. "While Lucerne was for rowing in Ireland, the Olympics is for the people of Ireland," he argues, underpinning the view that the sought after funding is vital if that step up is to be made.

On Towey's point about the need for full-time management, O'Callaghan says that with the funding available this has not been the "number one priority".

He refers to Tony O'Connor's arguments, made in these pages on Monday, about the need for top-class coaching, management, athletes and funding for a successful bid at the Olympics, but asks could not all four be better. On management, he says, "I stand on my record."

He says the athletes have been facilitated in fitting other parts of their lives into programmes and have had training camps and their own coaching regimes supported and funded, although they do not always acknowledge this.

"We don't have all the answers," adds O'Callaghan, saying he would prefer to sit down with the athletes and talk this through.

However, if he is being accused of not always giving the competitors their own way, he pleads guilty "because I have to account to the executive (of the IARU)".

O'Callaghan will soon be bringing ambitious plans before the International Rowing Committee and the executive for the cycle up to Athens 2004. Already being locked into place are structures which would work with gold medallist Sinead Jennings and her coach Hamish Burrell towards creating a lightweight double scull - in Edinburgh, where both are based.

This would demand a big sacrifice from others involved as they would have to move to another country.

From the organisational view this would need relatively large funding, as would plans to build towards three other Olympic crews and appoint a national coach.

And the funding decision is in the lap of the Sports Council and the Minister for Sport.