LockerRoom: Funny old weekend. It made you think about those dizzy days a few years ago when the suggestion that Dublin might someday stage the Summer Olympics didn't automatically draw waves of laughter. We had it all figured out back then. Gay Mitchell would be the figurehead. Jonathan Irwin would be the business mogul. The world would be charmed by our ability to party and to toss up a massive sporting infrastructure at the drop of a hat. And of course we'd all make out like bandits into the bargain.
On Friday, the Artists Formerly Known as BLÉ held a press conference at Leopardstown. The guys and gals had done more than a reasonable job on the World Cross Country championships, and for once it was possible to feel some sympathy for them.
Sure the backdrop at their press conference fell down; the star of the subsequent press conference was somewhere on the road to Wexford because the championships weren't signposted along the N11; there were embarrassing questions as to why people with black faces had such trouble getting visas; the ghost of Breda Dennehy Willis could still have haunted them.
Just another day on the Irish sporting stage, and the two which followed were by and large a success graced mainly by some of the last heroes in world sport. Paula Radcliffe, Sonia, Anne Keenan-Buckley and the other Irish women, and the magnificent Kenyans.
Yet if it hadn't been for the goodwill of Sonia O'Sullivan, herself the subject of much rabid backbiting on this island over the years, our cross country championships might have been a genuine disaster. Sonia's presence yesterday drew a crowd twice the size of Saturday's and was achieved almost single-handed.
O'Sullivan still gets criticised by tin pot patriots for not carrying the Irish flag all the way around an arena in Gothenburg seven years ago, and it matters not to those loons who see service to one's country in terms only of tricolours and anthems what else she has done since. This weekend she ran because the event was in Dublin and the event needed her. It needed her to run in the qualifiers in ALSA a few weeks ago. It needed her to crop up on the Late Late Show, it needed the media interest she always stirs, because otherwise the event would have turned into a private function and the £2.1 million budget would largely have slipped into the red and the best efforts of over 750 volunteers would have been wasted.
That Sonia turned up and ran one of the races of her life in a team filling its CV with similar achievements was reward for everyone.
What must people make of us and our silly arrogance as they survey our dabblings into the world of international sport? The visitor to these shores has had quite a smorgasbord of disaster from which to draw an impression.
The splash pool which we have grandiosely christened the National Aquatic Centre is sludged up with accusations of scandal, incompetence and controversy as the almost comical tale unfolds. Cost overruns. Shelf companies. Sweetheart deals.
Our national bird bath is, of course, just a damp corner of the great pleasure gardens dreamed up by the Taoiseach himself and modelled, as we were proudly told at a press conference 18 months ago, on that great Australian loss-maker at Homebush Bay. The whole enterprise was damned to hell and back by the independent reporters from High Point-Rendell a short while ago, but not only did no resignations follow, but the air over Abbotstown began to glow sulfureously with defiance.
A COPY of High Point-Rendell and its attendant press clippings has most surely made its way to the offices of UEFA in Lyon. Therein the watercooler talk must make Irish ears burn. We are gameball for co-staging the Euro 2008 soccer championships, although we have no stadium, just an idea about one, and a hope that soccer might be allowed into another.
Then, of course, there is the National Soccer League making a timely contribution to our overall national image by going into melt-down like a wedding function with too much drink and too much bad blood involved. Okay, okay, the League of Ireland was never the glorious centrepiece on our sumptuous spread of sporting delights, but to see it reduced to such an undignified mess after all the other messes it has survived, well, you'd cry if there wasn't a funny side, if the self-destruction wasn't coming just before the league switched to the brave new world of summer scheduling in a World Cup year, in a year when the GAA steps up to the plate with more product than ever before leaving domestic soccer to play out its climax on muddy fields and dark nights next winter anyway.
We had all that to look forward to, but now the smart money says that everyone will be tucked up in the warmth of the Four Courts for the great and costly unravelling.
We are a small, windswept island on the edge of Europe. We have trouble with matching the infrastructural requirements of booze ups and breweries. The best of what sporting assets we have nationally and regionally were built largely through the energy and drive of GAA people, an achievement for which they are envied and derided in equal measure.
We have little going for us except a few remarkable people, a handful of determined, heroic souls like John Tracey and Sonia O'Sullivan, who came from our benighted little cabbage patch to light up the world stage. They have been inspirations, but so to this weekend has been Anne Keenan-Buckley.
We had a good weekend, but if we want a sports policy for the next 20 years it shouldn't involve the self-aggrandising cack we have been wading through recently. It should be about the patient sowing of seeds. We need first to have a democratic and ethical sports policy which dovetails with health and education to produce a sporting generation that will be healthy and happy, a generation from which the emergence of superstars is probable and possible but not the criterion by which the policy will be judged.
Produce the Keenan-Buckleys and the Traceys and the O'Sullivans will arrive anyway, and in time we will have a sporting culture genuinely worthy of the events we aspire to stage.
