It has been a great year in sport for Irish women, who can inspire kids to take up physical activities, writes MARY HANNIGAN
IF IT is true that success breeds success, then, based on the achievements of our leading sportswomen in 2010, the years ahead might just yield enough titles and medals to raise our sporting spirits.
A remarkable year it was too, with Irish sportswomen excelling across a breadth of disciplines, from swimming to athletics, from boxing to horse racing, from golf to squash.
Established names such as Katie Taylor and Derval O’Rourke added yet more medals to their collections, while teenagers Gráinne Murphy and Ciara Mageean were already realising their potential.
Coming as they do from such a wide range of sports, it is not easy to make a direct connection between these competitors or account for why – other than happenstance – so many of them had such memorable years.
O’Rourke, though, points to what she describes as a “culture of success” – one she contributed to this year by winning the fourth major championship medal of her career – and the inspirational impact it can have.
“When these sportswomen set the standard, when they’re doing so well internationally, it almost becomes the norm,” she said. “And the only level of success now that is enough is winning medals, and that’s the level where the top Irish women across the sports are at. It’s not just that we’re making finals, we’re actually winning medals.”
While the Cork woman is hopeful that these successes can inspire young girls to try and emulate the achievements of their role models, more important still is that they simply encourage them to take up a sporting activity.
While there were some encouraging findings in the recently published Children's Sport Participation and Physical Activity Survey, not least the "significant" increase in the numbers of girls at post-primary level taking part in sport outside school hours, there were troubling statistics too.
Just 19 per cent of primary and 12 per cent of post-primary school children meet the minimum physical activity recommendations – “at least 60 minutes of moderate to vigorous physical activity daily”, with girls less likely than boys to meet that target. Partly as a consequence, the report found one in four children is overweight or obese and has an elevated blood pressure.
O’Rourke, who visits schools to talk to young pupils about her own experiences and the wider value of sport, noted too, as the report confirmed, “the big fall-off rate in girls’ participation in sport once they get to their late teens”.
That participation remains lower than male participation at every age level, although increases are being recorded for women between 25 and 45. The key now is to encourage the increasing number of young girls joining sports clubs – the report showing Gaelic football, swimming, camogie and soccer to be the most popular – to remain involved past their teenage years.
That, it is hoped, is where role models like Taylor, O’Rourke, Murphy and Mageean can be influential, even if not every young girl will aspire to following the sporting paths they have taken.
Their continued success, then, can only have wider positive consequences, with young girls now having a host of gifted Irish sportswomen, competing at the very highest level internationally and domestically, to look up to.
One of them will be crowned the 2010 Sportswoman of the Year award at a ceremony in Dublin today. The list of nominees is by far the most impressive and successful since the awards got under way six years ago.
After O’Rourke won silver in the 100 metres hurdles at the European Championships back in July, she talked of a six-year-old Cork girl, the daughter of her mother’s friend, taking to setting up hurdles – chairs and the like – around her home and spending a chunk of the day jumping over them – all the time insisting her family call her Derval.
“That we can give people a lift through what we do, and that we can encourage kids to get into sport, is just lovely,” said O’Rourke, “we can ask for no more than that.”