Faster, higher, richer: how Irish Olympians won the funding lottery

Jerry Maguire: “Yeah, yeah ... Show you the money.”

Rod Tidwell: “No! Not show you! Show me the money!”

Jerry Maguire: “Show me the money!”

Some of us have been around this business long enough to remember when that demand was put on our athletes, not on those expected to look after them. As you can imagine, it didn’t always have a pretty ending.

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Think of the Seoul Olympics in 1988. Back then we had several podium contenders, primarily in athletics. John Treacy was gunning for another medal in the marathon after winning silver in LA, Marcus O’Sullivan and Frank O’Mara had both been World Indoor champions the year before, and Eamonn Coghlan was still in his prime.

They all had decent shoe contracts, and appearance fees meant something too, so they got by without Government funding. Not that there was real funding anyway. Still, and for reasons forever mystifying, the people at Bord Lúthchleas na hÉireann (BLE) decided it was a good idea to demand 15 per cent of those athletes’ annual earnings or else they’d block their selection for Seoul.

Uh oh. Treacy was particularly fuming: his victory at the 1979 World Cross-Country in Limerick had helped bankroll BLE for years. The cheek of them.

[ John Treacy and Sonia O’Sullivan: World-beaters who became lasting icons of Irish sport ]

It quickly went bitter and for some it still is. In the end they were all selected (paid up or not), the damage already done. It unquestionably hurt Treacy’s preparation and he didn’t finish the marathon, Seoul being the last Olympics where the Irish team came home completely empty-handed. (Tip-toeing around Atlanta in 1996, where Michelle Smith won four medals, and Athens in 2004, where Cian O’Connor won a gold medal, on the back of Waterford Crystal, before being told he had to send it back.)

Not that our Olympic success was always about funding – medals were won over the years in Helsinki, Tokyo and Moscow when most Irish athletes were taking unpaid leave from work just to compete.

And think of Melbourne in 1956. The then Olympic Council of Ireland (OCI) was flat broke, and Ronnie Delany, who became the headline act with his gold-medal run in the 1,500 metres, was a borderline selection, purely on funding grounds. High jumper Brendan O’Reilly wasn’t so lucky. He was originally selected, had his bags packed at his college in Ann Arbor, Michigan, only to receive a two-word telegram: “Trip Cancelled.”

So Ireland sent a team of just seven boxers, three athletes, one yachtsman and a wrestler. Between them they won five medals – which must rank as the greatest ever return on any Olympic investment.

The old International Amateur Athletics Federation (IAAF), founded in 1912, held out as long as they could, but eventually, at their Congress in Athens in 1982, altered their charter to allow athletes to receive “compensation”. Many were getting it under the table anyway.

Once some athletes were winning money there was soon the need for others to be funded, which is where the taxpayer came in. Cospoir, the first Government sporting body, founded in 1978, used to distribute small grants mostly at random. Then the OCI played that role for a while, dishing out lottery money. It wasn’t until the Irish Sports Council, now Sport Ireland, became the Government’s statutory body for sport in 1999 that the whole thing became serious business.

With that also came the International Carding Scheme. Before Athens in 2004, around €4.3 million was dished out in high-performance funding, including €2.1m directly to athletes, up to a maximum of €30,500. Still there were few guarantees. After the poor showing in Athens, several long-serving athletes such as Sonia O’Sullivan, Mark Carroll, Karen Shinkins, Peter Coghlan, James Nolan and Gary Ryan had their grants cut in 2005 without any warning.

“Maybe instead of firing us, we should fire them,” said Carroll at the time, referring to those in charge. Nolan, still only 28, was even more damning: “In a normal job that would obviously be unfair dismissal,” he said, having been told his grant was cut just hours before departing to South Africa for training. Three-time Olympic rower Gearóid Towey, who had his grant of €30,500 cut to zero, said it felt like “a big kick in the teeth”.

So to Wednesday morning, where without any word of dispute, not even a note of complaint, Sport Ireland announced another multiannual funding package of €24 million towards high-performance sport in 2023, which effectively guarantees the same come next year’s Paris Olympics.

That’s up an extra €4m on last year, and at least €10m on the so-called Tokyo Olympic cycle, all aimed at the 19 sports expected to impact on Paris (the same 19 sports that qualified for Tokyo). It includes just under €3.5m in direct athlete support, the carding scheme expanded to 127 athletes and three relays/pool funding across 14 sports, 32 getting the top category of podium funding worth €40,000.

Some sports have won what must feel like some sort of funding lottery. Look at rowing: before Tokyo, it was well down the list in eighth, given €620,000 in high-performance funding behind athletics (€840,000), sailing (€800,000), boxing (€770,000), Paralympics Ireland (€700,000) and swimming (€630,000).

After the medal success in Tokyo (gold for men’s lightweight doubles Gary O’Donovan and Fintan McCarthy, bronze for the women’s four), and another four medals won at last year’s World Championships, Irish rowing is now our highest-funded Olympic sport by some distance.

Annual high-performance funding is up to just under €1.1m (€3.9m in the Paris cycle); rowers also got €757,000 in the 2023 carding scheme, 12 of them on the maximum €40,000, far more than athletes (€591,000) or boxers (€508,000), and under the multiannual model they are guaranteed the same next year.

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Irish rowing also got €490,000 in special high-performance impact funding over the last few years, on top of the annual governing body core grant, €368,000 for this year. All in, rowing funding is now just over €2m a year, just under half the entire Irish Olympic team funding for Athens back in 2004.

For Sport Ireland it’s all about return on that investment, the record Irish medal haul of 105 on the international sporting stage in 2022 (44 won at senior level, 61 at underage level) ample evidence of that. Consideration is also given to Olympic qualifying, the Irish women’s hockey team getting €300,000, on top of Hockey Ireland’s €856,666, to assist in that quest.

Only now more than ever there’s no disguising what drives the conversation around Olympic funding: Show us the medals!