IAN O'RIORDANlooks at the levels of investment required for success at the Olympics and why targeted funding is key to Ireland's chances

IN THE beginning there were 14 nations and 245 athletes, all of them male. There were nine sports, 43 medals to be won, and Baron de Coubertin was already worried that money was corrupting the whole thing.

The Olympics, more than any other sporting event, has always known the price of everything and the value of nothing, which is probably why they still don’t give out a single penny in prizemoney – and why some people will always count success on the medal table.

So if, from this morning, our first and last target in London over these next two weeks is to get someone on the podium, watch the Tricolour being run up the flagpole, hear the drowned-out anthem, then at least we’re not alone. They’re saying the same thing this morning, all over the world, from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe.

Show us the medals! For those taking part this must get a little tiresome, discouraging even: take the majority of the 66 Irish competitors in London, show them a place in their finals, or a placing at all, and they’ll still come home singing.

On the track and field, in particular, there may not be even a single Irish finalist, beyond those running in straight finals. Forget about any of them showing us a medal – and perhaps more than any other recent Olympics, no one is expecting a medal either.

Four years ago, in Beijing, all the talk was of “managing expectations”, but there’ll always be a difficulty separating perception from reality. That goes for the entire Olympic ideal.

Citius, Altius, Fortius? – Nothing to do with the Olympics, but the motto of a French Dominican monk, Henri Didon.

It’s not the winning but the taking part? – Not the words of De Coubertin, but of Bishop Ethelbert Talbot, from Pennsylvania, spoken during his sermon at the Olympic service in St Paul’s Cathedral, on the eve of the first London Games in 1908.

These days there’s not a country in the world that believes it’s about the taking part, or ever did, which is why they invest so heavily in winning medals. Beijing demonstrated that more than any other Olympics, when, in their quest to win as much as possible, China’s investment ran into the billions. It worked, as in the end they topped the medal table for the first time in their Olympic history, winning exactly 100 medals, 51 of them lacquered in gold.

It was calculated afterwards that each of those 100 medals had cost China an investment of around €40 million. You do the maths.

Beijing also demonstrated that no matter how much other countries invest there will never be enough medals to go round: of the 204 nations, only 86 won medals, and 118 went home empty handed. In track and field, which draws the widest participation, only 37 of the 204 nations won medals.

The idea that the three Olympic medals Ireland won in Beijing – in boxers Paddy Barnes, Darren Sutherland and Kenny Egan – were somehow achieved against the backdrop of some oddly amateur ideals is simply not true. After Athens, in 2004, boxing was targeted as the one sport in need of some urgent running repairs; before Beijing, only two Irish boxers had made it to the previous two Olympics, and won a single fight between them.

It’s easily forgotten that no one was trying to manage the boxing expectations for Beijing, because there simply weren’t any; the difficulty, as it turned out, was in managing the expectations afterwards. Within a year, one of them ended up with a drink problem, and another ended up taking his own life, a tragic reminder that success sometimes only increases the fear of failure.

Now London is the exact opposite, and the expectations on the Irish boxers have never been greater. For a country famous for punching above its weight it’s somehow fitting that they do offer our best hopes in London. It still seems to surprise some people too that boxing has always been Ireland’s most successful Olympic sport, winning 12 medals, over half our total of 23, from the 19 Games we’ve so far competed in.

There is no more realistic and reasoned voice in Irish sport right now than that of Billy Walsh, their high performance director, who has somehow managed to straddle the amateur and professional ideals of his sport, who has always known that amateurism was just being amateur, long before it became extinct.

In the four-year cycle to London, boxing has received €2.8 million in high performance funding, second only to Irish athletics (which got €3 million), and Walsh’s job has been to make sure that money is well spent. Katie Taylor, despite some perceptions, has been the best funded Irish athlete for the past five years, especially if medal bonuses are factored in, and not including other commercial income.

If that’s not money well spent then it’s hard to know what is: Taylor is one victory away from guaranteed bronze, and assuming she does make her final, will contest that with a record of 13 and 0. The only worry there, it seems, is that anything less than gold will be perceived as a failure.

Walsh believes that all five of the men are capable of winning medals, depending on the draw, or maybe even the judging, and it’s worth remembering why Joe Ward, originally the next best medal hope for London, will be watching it all at home on TV.

Barnes certainly knows what it takes to medal, John Joe Nevin’s time may well have come, and to walk out of the boxing arena with three medals would certainly satisfy most expectations.

There is still the argument that most other countries got a head start on this idea of “targeting” sports, Britain in particular, and that Ireland will always be playing catch up, and yet our boxing model is now being held up by other countries as the ideal.

Credit too to the Irish Institute of Sport: long bemoaned, it’s been reassuringly surprising the number of athletes paying tribute to their contribution, and it’s no coincidence that Gary Keegan, the brains behind the original boxing high performance team, is running that show.

Whether Irish boxing could have ever thrived like this without such substantial funding is hard to tell, and same goes for sailing – which got €2m in the London cycle funding. The last time there was as much talk about medals on the open water was in Athens, and yet they were soon steered off course. In London, Peter O’Leary and David Burrows boat in the suitably named “Star” class, and if so-called home advantage is the key, then winning a World Cup event in Weymouth just a few months back clearly demonstrates their potential. Annalise Murphy, too, clearly has the ability to medal, albeit with less experience, although sometimes in sailing that’s no disadvantage.

Experience is what sprint canoeist Andrzej Jezierski can certainly call on to bring him into the medals, and with that write a new chapter in Irish Olympic history: born and raised in Poland, Jezierski has been living in Cork in recent years, with wife Patricia and son Alex, and London could well make him a household name in his adopted country.

Eoin Rheinisch already made a name for himself in Beijing, finishing fourth, and with another round of €40,000 funding, will have done everything to put himself in the hunt once again.

Irish swimming is unquestionably benefiting from the strictly realistic input of high performance manager Peter Banks, especially the limitations he’s put on the young, albeit broadly determined, shoulders of Gráinne Murphy and Sycerika McMahon. Even with €1.8 million in Olympic cycle funding there are no expectations here, only hopes for the future.

So to the track and field, where in the year and a half that Irish athletes had to qualify for London, some fell over the line, others crossed it with something to spare, and lots more missed it by variously painful margins.

Now comes the hard part: if making it to London required a lifetime best – and in many cases it did – then actually reproducing it on the Olympic stage might be the best anyone can hope for. And yet if after this past year and a half someone had to hand pick around two dozen athletes to represent Ireland in London then these would be them (with just a few exceptions).

Predicting medals is easy, because there almost certainly won’t be any: the hard part is predicting finalists. For David Gillick, his road to London cut short by a weakness in his calf muscle, Rio 2016 can’t come quick enough, although if he’d been in 2009 form then Gillick might well have been our best chance of a finalist, in the 400 metres, like any sub-45 second man would be.

What ultimately defines the prospects of any athlete on the Olympic stage is how close they are to the peak of their career – and the problem for many of the Irish athletes in London is that they may be just past that peak, or else still approaching it. If that’s the difference between success and failure then we can expect plenty more of the latter. But there’s a difference, too, between failure, and not being good enough – because all the will in the world can’t make up for that.

Race walkers Rob Heffernan and Olive Loughnane, in an event notoriously difficult to predict, do present outside medal chances, if only because they know exactly what it takes. Derval O’Rourke, too, is no stranger to the Olympic stage, but at 30, is probably past her peak, and comes to London without breaking 13 seconds this season, and that puts even greater pressure on her ability to tear up the ranking list and steal a place among the best of the sprint hurdlers in the world. We’ll see.

What is certain, and in the words of Pat Hickey, president of the Olympic Council of Ireland, is this is our “best prepared” team ever – not just financially, but also physically, mentally, spiritually even, and of course geographically. No one will wake up in the morning not knowing where they are.

Perhaps each athlete, not just the Irish, should and will satisfy their own ambitions first, but in the end, after the 302 events, across the 32 sports, when they’ve divided out the 900 or so medals between around 11,000 athletes, everyone is left counting the cost, of success and failure.