This column will be about camogie, eventually. It will be about complacency and priorities and opportunities. It will be about getting kids playing sport, any sport. And about the sort of small-minded thinking that puts obstacles in their way.
But first, it will be about Paris.
Nothing broadens your sporting horizons like the Paralympics. Your assumptions about what sport can be, the things you thought you knew, the instinctive certainties you’ve had forever – they all get tossed into a blender and blitzed to a paste. Nowhere does the idea of sneering at a sport you don’t understand make less sense. It is a one-event war on sportupmanship.
Spend a single afternoon sitting in front of the TV watching goalball or wheelchair rugby or the T64 high jump (the one-legged high jump, basically) and you’ll never puff your chest about hurling being better than football again. Or at least not for a while. All those conversations just feel so small in a sporting world where amputee athletes are jumping their own height.
The Olympics had plenty of that too. Throughout the 18 days in Paris, you were constantly updating your idea of what sport is and where its outer boundaries actually lie. No matter what event you went to, the temptation, always, was to look out on to whatever court, pitch, body of water you were on the side of and go, “Why aren’t we in this? What’s stopping us?”
Something about the way Paris has framed the sports drives that urge even more. For instance, it’s unlikely you would have sat on the beach in Rio in 2016 and pondered why Ireland doesn’t have a beach volleyball team. There isn’t enough Factor 50 in the world to make a load of pasty Paddies think we could thrive in that environment. We know our place and it isn’t among the bronzed gods and goddesses of the Copacabana.
But the beach volleyball competition at the Olympics took place in a purpose-built sandpit at the foot of the Eiffel Tower. Granted, it was the most ludicrous, gorgeous, picture-postcard sandpit on the planet but it was a sandpit nonetheless. The nearest beach was 170km away. Are we really saying we couldn’t dig out a few sandpits of our own and stick them in, say, half the schools in the country?
Why wouldn’t we do that? Because the weather doesn’t be great? So what? The six beach volleyball medallists in Paris were Sweden, Germany and Norway (men), Brazil, Canada and Switzerland (women). Take out Brazil and you have five of the top eight countries on the winter Olympics all-time medal table. No reason for them to be beach volleyball strongholds, except that somebody decided to make it so.
When the volleyball nets came down, they converted that same space under the Eiffel Tower into a soccer pitch for the Paralympic blind football competition. The viewing options for the Paralympics aren’t as plentiful as they were for the Olympics – there’s no DiscoveryPlus option to pick and choose random sports at will – but if RTÉ or Channel 4 happen to stick it on some day, you could do worse than settle in for half an hour.
No more than beach volleyball wasn’t dreamed up as a sport to be played under the Eiffel Tower, neither was football imagined to be a sport you could play without being able to see. But then somebody thought of putting a bell in a ball and away they went. It’s been a Paralympic sport since 2004. With a fair wind, there’ll be a women’s tournament included in the programme for Los Angeles in four years. More people, more players, more sport.
Opportunity. Everything flows from it. In Ireland, we can talk about funding and coaching and sports science and analytics until our jaws ache and our brains melt but unless you give kids opportunities to play, the rest of it won’t matter a damn.
Which brings us back to camogie. The sport had the slight misfortune to have its All-Ireland final this year on the last day of the Olympics. It meant that the build-up to the biggest day of their year coincided with the whole country getting starry-eyed about Kellie and Rhasidat and Sophie and Phil and Sharlene and everyone else. No big deal, nobody’s fault. Just how it goes sometimes.
But here’s a thing that doesn’t make sense. With busloads of young girls coming to Dublin for the final, a few camogie clubs in the city got in touch with clubs in Galway and Cork to organise some Go Games matches for that morning. An hour of camogie in the morning, a bit of lunch, everybody heads off the All-Ireland final. What could be better?
Problem was, the Camogie Association decreed that no matches were to take place on the day of the All-Ireland final. This was a blanket rule, covering everything from an adult county championships down to seven- and eight-year-olds playing Go Games. That Sunday was to be kept clear for the finals day in Croke Park, unless specific permission was granted by the Camogie Association.
It got sorted in the end, but only after a fair bit of back-and-forth. Emails were exchanged, better angels were appealed to, a bit of common sense was asked for.
Maybe the most depressing aspect of it was that the Camogie Association asked to be provided with proof that travelling clubs and host clubs had bought tickets for the final before they would grant a derogation for the games to go ahead. Presumably for fear that the young girls playing would decide that they’d had their fill of camogie for the day before they got the chance to be a paying customer at Croke Park.
Opportunities. In Ireland, we have four big-ball sports that tower over all the smaller ones. That’s a cultural thing as much as it’s a sporting thing. But for all the work done by football, hurling/camogie, soccer and rugby in all the communities nationwide, culture creaks and cracks when it is complacent.
If you are a sporting organisation and you’re trying to prevent young girls playing your sport on the one day in your calendar when most people are paying attention, you need to have a frank conversation about your priorities. There’s a big wide sporting world out there and it’s dying to give your kids opportunities to play.
Imagine not knowing that. Imagine being so small-minded.
