Ian O’Riordan: Keep the faith even if Olympics have lost their shine

It doesn't feel that long ago since Ronnie Delany was telling me the difference between fate and faith. Fate, he said, was when you knew something about yourself that no one else did. It then requires considerable faith to see it through.

For Delany, fate meant winning an Olympic gold medal. He knew this about himself from a very young age and certainly before anyone else did. Then came the considerable faith required to see it through.

"There was no moment in Melbourne when I didn't believe I was going to win," Delany told me, around the time his book, Staying the Distance, was published to coincide with the 50th anniversary of his Olympic triumph.

“I think at that stage I did feel an element of fate. Once I struck and flew by everyone, I was not going to lose. I don’t do maybes, but it is terrifying to think about my life if I hadn’t won that Olympic gold medal. I can’t actually conceive it.”

Delany also admitted that while he had become somewhat dispassionate about modern athletics, he still felt the purity, magic and essence of it come through at the Olympics.

The question now, another decade on, is whether any of that still holds true, especially after the year just past when the sport lost so much faith in itself and in so many of those around it.

Unheralded athlete

By the time this summer’s Olympic Games in Rio roll around, it will be 60 years since Delany fulfilled his moment of fate – as a 21-year-old student, on an American scholarship at Villanova University, largely unheralded on the global stage.

Coupled with the considerable faith in himself and the sport, Delany won the 1,500 metres at those 1956 Olympics in Melbourne with still astonishing velocity, falling to his knees in the immediate aftermath, as if acknowledging that perfect sense of destiny.

How things have changed. It’s not only inconceivable that an unheralded athlete like Delany could win the 1,500 metres in Rio. Even if he did, not many people could conceive it without questioning whether or not doping was involved. It’s as if the basic elements of fate and faith have been so thoroughly eliminated from the track and field that there will never again be room for an athlete like Delany.

The series of crippling revelations in recent months, with more to come – from systematic doping in Russia and beyond to the clear and flippant acceptance of it by the very people who are meant to police it – has brought the sport to its knees – and obviously not in the Delany sense.

Money and power

It’s hard to imagine a return to the days when faith and fate could so perfectly conspire to create such an Olympic gold medallist. And not just because of doping, but also because of the money, power and prestige that have become increasingly ingrained in the Olympic business and without which the whole thing would no longer exist.

There is also the sense of ill-fate now surrounding Rio's suitability for hosting the games. Expect that to become increasingly worrying ahead of the opening ceremony on Friday, August 5th. It may still be the country's Ciudad Maravillosa, but Brazil's economic and political scene is going marvellously wrong. Things were booming in 2009, when Rio was awarded the Olympic Games; now the country is gripped in its worst recession since the 1930s.

The Brazilian currency, the real, lost a third of its value last year, gross domestic product has tumbled, inflation is nearing 10 per cent and unemployment is also on the rise.

President Dilma Rousseff – whose popularity rating is also hovering around 10 per cent – is facing impeachment proceedings over allegedly fiddled public accounts, and the public is still horrified by the corruption scandal that sank state oil company Petrobras.

The Olympic venues may be nearing completion, although there’s still no clearing the pathogenic sewage from the historic Guanabara Bay, where Portuguese explorers first arrived on January 1st, 1502 (hence Rio de Janeiro, “January River”).

Operating budget

The Rio organising committee has outlined plans to cut almost 30 per cent (€478 million) off its operating budget of €1.75 billion, which means no televisions in the athletes’ village, only rice and beans for the stadium VIPs and less transportation for the media.

What the normally straight-faced people in the International Olympic Committee (IOC) can at least agree on is that Rio hosting the Olympics two years after Brazil hosted the World Cup is not ideal. Or that maybe South America is just not ready to stage its first Olympics after all.

In his new year message, IOC president Thomas Bach said that "undoubtedly, recent developments in some sports cast a shadow across the whole world of sport", but that the Olympics in Rio "will bring the world a message of hope and joy during difficult times".

Right now that may sound like wishful thinking, but for the majority of athletes, the purity, magic and essence of sport still come through at the Olympics.

It will most certainly leave an indelible imprint on their lives. There may also be irrevocable differences between what it means or takes to be an Olympic gold medallist in 2016 compared with 60 years ago, although like Ronnie Delany, there will be some sense of fulfilling their fate, whether that means winning an Olympic gold or simply taking part in the opening ceremony.

For those reasons alone it’s worth keeping the faith. Some people will argue the alternative, but I can’t actually conceive it.