PRESENT TENSE:DURING THE week, a friend wondered whether it was true that the three largest growing sports in Ireland are tag rugby, spinning and triathlon. I didn't know, although it sounded somewhat plausible.
Tag rugby started from a base of zero only a few years ago, so it has an advantage in the “fastest growing sport” stakes. As for spinning, while it’s increasingly popular, it’s an exercise rather than a sport. For those who don’t know what it is, spinning is a stationary bike exercise in which you cycle until you’ve sweated your last drop – all while someone yells at you to push harder, to a soundtrack of Dutch techno. It’s a surreal form of torture. About 30 minutes into it you’ll admit to the Kennedy assassination if it means making it stop. A lot of people love it.
Put “fastest growing sport in Ireland” into Google, and you get assertions about it being surfing, canoeing and the military game airsoft. An Phoblacht ran a piece which began: “What’s the fastest growing sport in Ireland? You’re right, Women’s Gaelic Football.” Right? How many guesses did the reader get?
As it happens, on Wednesday, my colleague Ian O’Riordan wrote about doing his first triathlon, in Athy, Co Kildare, last weekend, and mentioned that it was the fastest growing participation sport “in the free world”. TriAthy had 2,500 entrants, which is a remarkable number.
This was also weekend when over 40,000 did the Women’s Mini-Marathon. When the weather allowed the sea swimmers to take off at least one of their rubber hats and enjoy the experience. And as with every weekend, great numbers became Lycra blurs on their racing bikes; joggers, with their familiar flushed cheeks and slumped hips, swarmed through parks, along boreens, river paths and beaches.
When you start to notice these legions of weekend Olympians, the question isn’t so much what is the fastest growing sport in Ireland, but how much the very nature of sport in Ireland is changing.
In our collective attitude, sport still means what we see on the back pages of the paper. It’s what Sky Sports charges you a fortune for. It’s what we go and scream at referees during. It’s about teams and clubs and parishes. It’s played either by kids or by 20-somethings getting a few years at the top before they wake up and find their belly has suffered a landslide.
In fact, sport in Ireland – as elsewhere – is no longer just about that. It’s not about taking up sport at 13, but at 30. It is no longer about competition, but about personal achievement. It’s about joggers with their headphones, first-time triathletes, people shopping for wetsuits.
It’s about middle-aged men wearing Lycra for the first time, feeling strangely snug and then ignoring the houseful of guffaws as they make their way out on the bike.
For many modern athletes, the achievement of getting out there and running a five-mile race or doing a triathlon means so much because it requires overcoming the fatalism that sets in for many when they hit their 30s. That’s the point at which your knees start to complain, your spine gets lazy and your body becomes your enemy. Every instinct tells you it’s time to stop running or jumping or playing, and to just sit down and have another biscuit.
Modern athletes are good citizens too. Okay, so they can be smug citizens sometimes. And they can be a bit tedious in how much they like to talk about their mileage or their fartlek training or anaerobic this and that. But they’re looking after their health; they don’t need lottery grants to keep going; they buy their own equipment.
It could be seen as being an atomistic thing, a symptom of a culture of individuals rather than communities. Training on your own does suit the life of the middle-aged, fitting in a run around work and family and the odd lie-in. But it doesn’t mean isolation. Races can be huge – the lead-up to the Dublin marathon includes a series entered by thousands – and communities might be diffuse, but they regularly talk online or meet on race days.
There is a depression among many sports clubs at the perceived decline in participation sport in this country, with GAA and rugby clubs watching many young people leave sport when they hit their 20s, or hang on for a while only to drift out of it long before their 30s. The flip side is that many come back a decade or two later, it’s just in a less obvious way and one only occasionally noticed by the media.
So, next time you see a middle-aged man wobbling down the road in unflattering Lycra, there are some things you shouldn’t do. Someone I know had a full nappy thrown at him from a passing car. Another had his backside smacked by a passenger moving at 50kph (the handprint may never fade). That hardly shows the respect these athletes deserve. And if you must snigger, please do it quietly.
shegarty@irishtimes.com
