The wind carried the words of the commentator over the ditches and flooded boreens around Mosney.

"If you want to know what an announcer's nightmare is, it's that there are four runners from each county in the marathon and they all have the same numbers, so I can't tell you who's leading. But what I can tell you is that it looks like the girl who led from the beginning . . . Hold on, I can tell you . . . It's Madeline Turner. Good on ya Madeline."

No Madeline Turner in the programme. Only a Madeline Dorney. Oh well, that's the Community Games for you. They'll sort it out.

With 5,800 competitors, all under 17 and wanting to make good, national finals weekend at Mosney was the place for any self-respecting athlete to to undergo their athletics rites of passage.

Throw a stick into any national championships and you'll hit a star who has gorged themselves hyperactive on soft drinks, chocolate and midnight feasts and pulled a few medals up in what we used to call Butlins. Sonia O'Sullivan, Stephen Roche, Eamon Coghlan, Niall Hogan, Gary O'Toole, Michelle de Bruin, Susan Smith, Niall Quinn and, more recently, Emily Maher, they've all been. The Irish soccer centre forward, writing in the Games booklet, echoes the memories of most who have spent a long weekend in the chalets.

"Frequently, many people ask me to reveal my proudest moment in sport. World Cup? Wembley? Lansdowne Road? Some even mention Croke Park. Well, they are always wrong. My proudest moment took place back in September 1975 at Mosney in the All-Ireland under-12 long puck final," he says.

The holiday camp yesterday heaved and crawled with children like maggots on a carcase. Mosney was being devoured. The Olympic Stadium was a stretch of roped-off grass and Croke Park was at right angles to it. In the Ballroom a basketball grudge match was being fought out between Moy cullen and Castleblaney.

Torrential rain lashed the caravans and VIP stand. Wind scoured the grounds. Under such conditions you have not seen triumph in the face of adversity until you have watched the little match stick-limbed girls flap into a gale in the under-eight 60-metre sprint. In the high jump the little ones were in danger of being carried away in gusts like discarded newspapers, so they moved the event indoors.

On the hurling pitch a fierce confrontation in the under-13 final was taking place between Galway and Kilkenny - and that was only on the sideline between the parents. They sloshed around undeterred, hundreds of parents, thousands of children.

In the pool they had 900 splashing up and down through 96 heats, 48 semi-finals, 24 finals. In gymnastics 300 competitors, basketball 160, and so it went . . . hockey, Gaelic games, camogie, table tennis, pitch and putt, cross-country running . . . mind numbing logistical problems, the Community are nothing if not a mass movement, a juggernaut which moves through the country every year at parish level, county level, provincial level and finally pulls up exhausted at Mosney half a million children later.

At the back of their booklet the organisers listed 82 ways for children to raise money including, rather interestingly, a film premiere night. It's a "can do" movement with laudable ideals of community involvement and co-operation but, essentially, it's fun.

"In Cobh we used to have a parade from the nuns' convent to the GAA field and if you didn't win you would get a lollipop or a chance to run in the three-legged race," said Sonia O'Sullivan.

Not a bad idea for the Sydney Olympics?