On one of the many late mornings this week, during the blurry withdrawal from three weeks away in Paris, the postman knocked on the open front door with his loaded question.
“They were the best Olympics we’ve ever seen, now, weren’t they . . . Just a pity we couldn’t win any medals in athletics, wasn’t it?”
Well now. Everyone has their own measure or reflection of success on the Olympic stage, and it doesn’t always have to begin or end with the winning of medals. No matter the colour or the country that wins them.
Speaking strictly about athletics, however, there is ample evidence that Paris was the best Olympics in track and field history and so the most difficult one to win a medal at. Yes, ever!
From the 200 countries that took part (comprising 2,000 athletes including the relay reserves), a total of 27 countries won gold, two more than the previous record figure. In all, 43 countries made it on to the podium with countries producing top-eight performances. These included Ireland, with Rhasidat Adeleke finishing fourth in the women’s 400m and fourth again 24 hours later as part of the women’s 4x400m relay.
Adeleke was looking to become just the seventh Irish athletics medal winner since our first Games as an independent State in 1924. Over that 100 years we won two golds for Dr Pat O’Callaghan in the hammer (1928 and 1932), gold for Bob Tisdall in the 400m hurdles (1932), gold for Ronnie Delany in the 1,500m (1956), silver for John Treacy in the marathon (1984) and for Sonia O’Sullivan in the 5,000m (2000), and finally bronze for Rob Heffernan in the 50km walk (2012).
Ample evidence, if again needed, of just how rare our athletics medals are.
Olympic history was also made in Paris by Thea LaFond from Dominica (women’s triple jump), Arshad Nadeem from Pakistan (men’s javelin) and Julien Alfred from Saint Lucia (women’s 100m) as they claimed their country’s first ever athletics gold medals.
Letsile Tebogo from Botswana went better again when winning the men’s 200m, his country’s first Olympic title in any sport. His win took the total number of countries who have now won an athletics medal in the history of the Olympics to 105.
We witnessed three world records, with the USA running 3:07.41 in the mixed 4x400m replay, Sweden’s Mondo Duplantis clearing 6.25m in the pole vault, and Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone from the USA running 50.37 to win the 400m hurdles. There were 13 Olympic records, 21 continental records, 99 national records, and 311 personal bests.
McLaughlin-Levrone’s performance was emblematic of the Paris quality in another way. For more than a century, scoring tables have been used to compare results and progression achieved in different athletic events, taking in various statistical data and rate of improvement.
Her world record of 50.37 seconds was worth 1322 on the scoring tables, the highest in women’s athletics history. It moved her ahead of the 1314 score for Florence Griffith-Joyner and her 100m world record of 10.49 seconds which still stands from 1988. The third-highest score is McLaughlin-Levrone’s previous world record of 50.68 set at the US Olympic trials in June.
World Athletics also have a competition performance ranking system, which collates and rates all the results. Paris was number one in Olympic competitiveness, scoring a total of 198,320 and improving on Tokyo (197,115), Rio (195,953), London (192,456) Beijing (191,749) and Athens (190,871).
It’s still very early days into the next four-year cycle, but there’s no reason to suspect the Los Angeles Olympics in 2028 won’t surpass this score once again, given this constant progression in global athletics’ standards.
This in turn needs to be reflected in whatever new funding package is directed towards Irish athletics over the same period. Unfair as it is to compare or contrast the difficulty of winning medals in different Olympic sports, in rowing at the Paris Games only 64 countries qualified boats and 15 made it on to the medal podium (the one medal won by the Belarusian boat under the neutral flag was discounted).
Of those, 11 medals were won by European nations, and the four others were the USA, Canada, New Zealand and Australia. There was no rowing medal won by anyone from Africa or South America. Ireland ended up ranked joint fifth, thanks to the gold medals won by Paul O’Donovan and Fintan McCarthy in the lightweight double sculls, and the bronze medals won by Philip Doyle and Daire Lynch in the doubles.
Earlier this year, when Sport Ireland announced its final high-performance funding for the Paris cycle, rowing was once again the big winner, as it had been since the medal success in Tokyo, (gold there for the men’s lightweight double of O’Donovan and McCarthy and bronze for the women’s four).
In all, Rowing Ireland received a high-performance investment of €1,093,334 for 2024 (€3,900,000 for the Paris Olympic cycle) ahead of Paralympics Ireland (€1,000,000/€3,700,000), the Irish Athletic Boxing Association (€965,000/€3,500,000). Athletics Ireland was the fourth highest with €841,666/€3,365,000.
Of the 33 athletes awarded the top-tier category of podium funding for 2024, worth €40,000 each, Rowing Ireland had 16, with four in boxing and three in athletics. It brought rowing’s total of the international carding scheme to €863,000, with Athletics Ireland the next highest with €645,000.
Before the Tokyo medal success, rowing was down that 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). Irish rowing also got €490,000 in special high-performance impact funding over the last few years and is now our highest-funded Olympic sport by some distance.
Some might argue that shouldn’t be the case and that athletics, given how difficult it is to compete at Olympic level, never mind win medals, might deserve a greater share of the funding pie.
