Ireland's Olympic medical team has doubled for this year's Games, with more specialists than ever before. Robin O'Brien Lynch reports
Ireland's Olympians will be travelling with their largest medical staff to date, thanks to a new deal arranged by the Olympic Council of Ireland (OCI) with the International Olympic Committee (IOC).
In the past, teams were restricted to a ratio of five or six medics for every 50 athletes. This placed serious restrictions on small nations like Ireland, but left the bigger teams free to bring along a whole coterie of specialist staff, including nutritionists, psychologists and physiologists.
Under the new deal, Ireland will be allowed to bring a medical team of 13 for its 49 Olympic athletes.
This has been made possible by accommodating most of the medical team outside the Olympic Village. However, the externally-based medical staff will have full access to the athletes.
"With five spaces, there's only really room for maybe two doctors and three physios, as the absolute minimum necessary," according to Dr Seán Gaine, chief medical officer of the Athens team.
"The IOC was very reluctant to allow any more accreditations, which is understandable as the Olympic Village would be swamped.
"The prima donnas on the American team would want their own personal assistant and coach and so on," Gaine adds.
To gain more accreditations, the Irish team would have needed to bump up the number of athletes to 75, which was unlikely, considering the size of this year's team.
"We're actually sending our smallest team of athletes for a long time, as the IOC has reduced numbers across the board in an effort to stop the Games spiralling out of control," says team physiologist Dr Giles Warrington.
"However, we've arranged to have external staff living outside the complex but with day passes to the village. So we've doubled our medical team.
"Of course, this means the ratio of medic to athlete is much better than it has been for years," he adds.
One of the 'extras' for this year's medical team has been the addition of a sports psychologist, in the person of Niamh Fitzpatrick.
This is concrete recognition of sport psychology's shift from an experimental role to a central one, as more and more coaches and management teams realise the importance of proper mental preparation.
The days of scepticism are fading fast, as most modern athletes view mental preparation as a vital part of their training regimes.
"I suppose if someone thought it was a load of nonsense they mightn't say it to my face, but certainly I've never had anyone walk away from me in disgust," Niamh says.
Potential distractions are everywhere in the Olympic Village, where over 16,000 athletes and training staff will be staying. The village's main restaurant alone holds up to 5,000 diners.
"Some athletes will be at their first games, there'll be a lot of noise, a lot of queuing.
"They won't have their regular support team, they'll have a new physio, a new doctor, a new psychologist and they have to follow their training routines in unfamiliar circumstances," says Niamh.
Training on the same patch of grass as Olympic legends can also be off-putting.
"Sometimes they might see a an icon strolling past, someone with three or four medals that they've admired for years, like Maurice Green or whoever, and it's all so easy to get distracted by that," she adds.