FOR AN Irish team that travelled to Beijing more in hope than expectation, the 2008 Olympics have certainly surprised and will now go into the record books as one of the most successful in our sporting history. A silver and two bronze medals put the Irish team in 62nd place in the final table, a very satisfactory achievement, particularly for boxing which seems to consistently outperform some of the more celebrated Olympic sports.
Despite yielding more medals for Ireland than any other sport since 1924, boxing in Ireland has always been a poor relation in terms of funding and facilities. That situation was partly addressed for Beijing through the Sports Council's high-performance strategy but the displays of medal winners Kenny Egan, Paddy Barnes and Darren Sutherland owed as much to their own determination, honesty and skill than any injection of cash.
Although Ireland's medal haul was confined to boxing, it would be wrong to casually dismiss the performances of some of the other Irish competitors just because they won't be returning with medals. Canoeist Eoin Rheinsech finished only one place outside the first three in his event while track athlete Paul Hession, walkers Robert Heffernan and Olive Loughnane, and swimmer Andrew Bree also performed with distinction.
However, these achievements cannot disguise some very disappointing displays by high-profile competitors. Track and field is always the showpiece of the Olympics and most of the funding for Irish teams is targeted towards our elite athletes. The return from this investment in Beijing has been very poor. Many of the athletes failed to come anywhere near their personal best times, a benchmark most would have considered a minimum requirement in China. Those failures should lead to a comprehensive review of all our Olympic programmes for the 2012 games in London. And a good starting point in any detailed analysis of the Beijing games would be Britain itself. The outstanding British performance in Beijing has vindicated a long-term strategy - introduced after Sydney 2000 - to identify and then provide increased funding for sports that could deliver medals in 2008 and 2012.
The next challenge facing Britain will be on a completely different scale. Following the Chinese as hosts will be far more daunting than producing Olympic champions. The Beijing games have been a spectacular triumph for the Chinese who have prided themselves in staging an Olympics that will be remembered more for sublime sporting moments, brilliant organisation and state-of-the-art facilities than political protest and overbearing security.
Hosting the Olympics is now such a mammoth exercise that it is only really suitable for major world cities which already have much of the required infrastructure in place. Even by those standards, Beijing must have surpassed the hopes of the members of the International Olympic Committee who take their leave of the Chinese capital with their Olympic brand endorsed as truly the greatest show on earth.