RowingLiam Gorman looks below the surface of the relative failure of our rowers in Athens

Athens was quite an experience: the big facilities were superb and the ordinary Greek men and women in the street were friendly and helpful as they could be. But the transport system didn't always knit together and accommodation costs were jacked up; you got the impression of a system where a recent deluge of money was supposed to have solved all the underlying problems and hadn't.

And then you come back to Ireland and the people who know everything are complaining: in the last two years we've spent tens of millions on those athletes in green - why aren't they producing medals? One man who tried to establish some context was Niall O'Toole.

Not long after the Ireland lightweight four had given their all in an Olympic final, he began to talk to the assembled media about what he said was the disgraceful neglect of the structures for under-23s in Irish rowing.

You may not come across that bit in print anywhere else. In the last year some of our best young athletes ended up packing bags in Tesco to elicit donations so they could represent the country at a major championship. But that's not big news and we don't make the link from that to a poor performance in Athens. We should.

The Irish rowing team at the Olympics owed a huge amount to the World under-23 Regatta, formerly known as the Nations Cup. O'Toole and Gearóid Towey are former world champions at this level and the lightweight four developed from the crews that won bronze in 2000 and silver in 2001. And yet earlier this month the Ireland team travelled to Poznan in Poland for the World under-23 Regatta with no coach and a team manager, Mick O'Callaghan, who had stepped into the breach to take care of the team.

Lack of funding not tied directly to the Olympic effort was one of the key problems here. And to this writer, the way our Olympic funding is distributed needs to be revamped. Sport is a continuum: there will be those who form an elite, but to take those and give them everything they ask for is not necessarily the perfect way to create a successful team. Rather, this elite should be the flower atop a healthy, organic structure.

And there is a corollary to presenting money to a group and telling them to achieve something. We feel they owe us.

I sat in two different stadia in Athens and watched two promising young Irish athletes underperform. A year earlier they were striving for something pure - to jump higher, to box harder - now they surely sensed that among the well-meaning fans were those who expected something for their money. And that is a different kind of pressure, especially for an inexperienced competitor.

The lure of the Olympics is great. On reflection, one of our best medal hopes, the lightweight double scull of Sam Lynch and Gearóid Towey, would have had to be extremely lucky to manage to maintain their power as lightweights through the Games.

Asked yesterday if he should have stood in their way, coach Thor Nilsen said he should.

"It was like playing Russian roulette - with five bullets in the chamber," he said. "I'm really sorry for these two excellent athletes; they had a lot of effort," he added. "I hope they will continue to prove themselves as two of the best lightweights in the world."

As the man in charge of the lightweight programme, Nilsen says he takes full responsibility for the team not achieving its aims and expects not to be asked to take charge again: "I will be surprised if they ask me in future. It was my responsibility and I didn't deliver."

The septuagenarian isn't short of options. "To my big surprise I have had serious offers from other countries," he says. "I should never employ a 73-year-old. He could die at any time!"

He hints at the direction Irish rowing might go: "They surely sensed that among the well-meaning fans were those who expected something for their money rather than pull together. In Irish rowing the high-performance director is from outside Ireland, the coach is from the outside. The Irish don't want to listen to each other."

If the Irish Amateur Rowing Union want to look to home they may not be short of options. The most successful Irish coach in Athens was John Holland, who coached the Greek lightweight double to a medal. And O'Toole says he would consider coaching if he were properly remunerated.

Watch this space.