On the opening weekend of the Olympic regatta Paul O’Donovan walked into the mixed zone flogging a punchline, mercilessly. In the draw, the reigning World and Olympic champions were just the third seeds. O’Donovan greeted every microphone with a stand-up riff he had composed earlier, pretending to be injured by the slight, or pretending not to be.
“I can’t even count how many names are above us [in the seedings],” he said. “We are just here to enjoy ourselves, do the best we can and take a few of the big scalps – all going well.”
O’Donovan’s self-portrait as an underdog was deliberately preposterous. It was the only gag in the routine. O’Donovan and Fintan McCarthy were favourites to win the gold medal, just as they had been favourites for every race they had rowed together for the previous five years. For them, being an underdog or not being an underdog had no consequence. They had a cold contract with each other to make the boat go faster.
For generations of Irish sportspeople, being an underdog had been a fossil fuel. In the popular imagination, winning was wrapped up with fire. Put ‘em under pressure. Boot and bollock. Stand up and fight.
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It was a safe space where winning was optional and losing was available with a range of painkillers and rounds of applause. All of it was a cop-out.
In the Golden Age of Irish sport, winning has become intentional. Elite Irish sportspeople make themselves accountable to winning and losing rather than innocent hostages to the outcome. ‘If’ has been emasculated. O’Donovan and McCarthy were convinced they would become the first Irish athletes since Pat O’Callaghan to retain an Olympic title. They knew it was in their hands.
Gymnast Rhys McClenaghan and swimmer Daniel Wiffen were of the same mind, though they expressed it with chutzpah. “There’s some things you set out to do,” said McClenaghan a couple of months after he won gold at the Olympics. “Not just taking part but taking over. As soon as I could see the pathway to being the best in the world I was like, ‘Ok, I’m going to say it because it needs to be said.’”
After he won his Olympic gold Wiffen spoke about his nerves, but most of all he spoke about his certainty. “I had no doubt in my mind,” he said. “I had won this already, before I walked out [to the pool].” When he appeared at the RTÉ Sports awards before Christmas he said it wasn’t a question of ‘if’ he would be on the podium at the LA Games, it was only a question of how many medals he would win; his expectation is three.
At the Olympics and the Paralympics this cultural shift was crystallised more than ever. It wasn’t forced or fake. Orla Comerford won bronze in the T13 100m and her first reaction was “disappointment”. At her third Games, this was her first medal. The two athletes who finished ahead of her had both broken the existing world record. When Comerford met her family, she said, her feelings softened, but her first reaction was the most truthful.
“I reckoned at the start of the year that it was going to take a world record to win it and that’s what I had my eyes on,” she said. “I know that was ambitious, but I think that is well within my wheelhouse. I just feel like there is lots more in tank.”
It would have been easy to hide behind the bronze medal and pretend it was the measure of her dreams, and for generations of Irish athletes that would have been the instinctive response: be grateful for the bread on your table.
Winning has no truck with moderation, though; it is governed by greed. In rowing, Philip Doyle and Daire Lynch became the first Irish heavyweight crew to win an Olympic medal, but they weren’t satisfied with bronze either. “It was kind of a wave of positive and negative [as we crossed the finishing line],” said Doyle. “Relief and disappointment.”
The only way they could have won gold was to cultivate those feelings. If they had aimed for the bottom step on the podium, where would they have ended up?
Rhasidat Adeleke ran the third fastest time of her career and came fourth in the Olympic final. To win a medal she would have needed to break 49 seconds for the first time in her life. In the course of her season, she set six new Irish records as an individual and six as part of relay teams. At the European Championships, she won two silvers and one gold. Good year?
In a series of interviews hosted by one her sponsors before Christmas she said she still “had PTSD” from the Olympics. When she’s scrolling through photographs on her phone she skips the images from Paris, she said.
In terms of medals at major championships, Adeleke had the best season of any Irish athlete since Sonia O’Sullivan in 1998. But her goal was an Olympic medal, and all the other stuff couldn’t make up for that loss. The European Championships and the Olympics were different currencies, and there was no exchange rate.
Adeleke is one of the most talented sports people that Ireland has ever produced, and like Wiffen and McClenaghan and O’Donovan and McCarthy, she has no business sifting through the detritus of a loss in search of comfort, or mitigation. In her mind, she was accountable to the outcome.
“I didn’t achieve my dreams today,” she said immediately after the race. “In the future I just hope I’ll be able to perform at my best when it’s most important.”
At these altitudes the falls are precipitous. Leinster Rugby and Rory McIlroy spend a lot of time near the summit. The footing is treacherous; they slipped again. Leinster are still stuck on four European Cups; McIlroy is stuck on four majors: flamboyant, brilliant, box-office, agonisingly close, tormented.
A month after he bogeyed three of the last four holes at the US Open, McIlroy turned up in the media centre at the Scottish Open, trying to explain himself again. In these situations, over the years, McIlroy has been remarkably candid and generous in his answers. He has sat behind those microphones and somehow led the case for the defence and the prosecution. McIlroy has always understood that being plausible after a crushing loss required a degree of self-rebuke and admission of weakness. Many other sportspeople don’t care about being plausible in public.
The short putts he missed on the 16th and the 18th overshadowed the clutch putt he holed on the 17th. He came from three shots behind at the beginning of the day to put himself in a winning position at the only time in the tournament when that status mattered. To get there, he had managed his mind and played some brilliantly controlled golf.
In the press conference at the Scottish Open he gave a site engineer’s report on the sliding, slippery, smelly, downhill putt he missed on the final green, when he needed to hole it to be sure of a play-off, at least. It felt like the kind of putt that McIlroy could miss at any time, but, according to the statistics, he had not missed from inside five feet on the PGA Tour all season – from nearly 500 putts – until the closing holes at Pinehurst. By the end of the year, he ranked third on tour for putts holed from that range.
With McIlroy, the assumption is always that his mind let him down. He needed to confront that likelihood again. In elite sport, that component cannot be wished away. In that context, McIlroy said something interesting about the putt he missed on the 16th, which was shorter and much easier than the putt he missed on the final green.
“I can vividly remember starting to feel a little uncomfortable waiting for my second putt on 16,” he said. “The first putt [from distance] looked like it could be a birdie, and it ran a foot by where I thought it was going to finish. I marked it, Patrick [Cantlay] was hitting his putt, and he can take his time [Cantlay is one of the slowest players on tour].
“You have to be really deliberate in what you’re doing. I just think I had to wait a while to hit that second putt. The more you stand there it’s hard not to either start thinking about the future or notice where Bryson’s [De Chambeau] ball is in the fairway. But, again, that’s on me to make sure I’m in the right head space.”
With Leinster, just like McIlroy, it went down to the wire. By having a kick to win the Champions Cup in the final minute of regulation time, they had put themselves where they had planned to be: in a winning position when it mattered most. This was their intention.
Since they last won the title, Leinster have now lost four finals. There is no remedy for past defeats. Like Lot’s wife in the Bible, looking back will turn you into a pillar of salt.
“We said in the changing room, ‘When you want to do great things and you want to achieve great things, you always want the risk of failing greatly as well,’” said James Ryan afterwards. “Would I rather be in a team that tries to be the best team in Europe every year and have risks in a team like this? I still would.”
And that’s the point. Winning, wanting to win, being desperate to win, is the riskiest thing of all. Underdogs hold themselves to different standards. Being an underdog is an each-way bet. It is the realm of “might” and “maybe” and “what harm?”
Willie Mullins gave that up a long time ago. On the day he trained his 100th Cheltenham Festival winner Ruby Walsh recalled Mullins’ refusal to sell a talented young horse called Wither or Which back in the mid-1990s. At that stage, Mullins had trained just one Cheltenham winner and the economy of Irish racing was such that most trainers were forced to sell their best young horses.
Mullins made the decision that his yard wasn’t going to be like that. He embraced the risk. Mullins was still riding as an amateur at the time and in March 1996 he rode Wither or Which to win the Champion Bumper at Cheltenham. Twenty-eight years later, his 100th winner came in the same race, with his son Patrick in the saddle.
The growth of Mullins’ dominance over the last decade has been one of the most extraordinary stories in Irish sport. It is only 11 years since he became the Irish trainer with the most Cheltenham winners, beating Tom Dreaper’s record of 26 that had stood for more than 40 years. At no other time in the history of Cheltenham, though, was 100 festival winners imaginable.
On the day in March when Mullins reached that milestone, he saddled a treble. In the opening race, a grade one for novice hurdlers, he trained the first five home. Less than two months later he was crowned champion trainer in Britain, the first Irish-based trainer to achieve that feat over jumps since Vincent O’Brien 70 years ago.
There are people in the sport who find his dominance oppressive and boring, but that is a relic of old thinking. He distanced himself from the herd. Great sportspeople make that separation.
Aidan O’Brien has been at Mullins’ altitude for decades. Before Royal Ascot he trained his 400th group one winner, worldwide, an astonishing number. In November he trained his 20th Breeders’ Cup winner, joining D Wayne Lukas on top of the all-time list, at a meeting where the odds are weighted heavily in favour of American trainers.
Mullins and O’Brien, we take for granted. The excellence of the Ireland rugby team has become a given, too. Excluding the pandemic-ravaged schedule in 2020, Ireland have, on average, lost five Test matches in the year after a World Cup; this year they lost just three times and won the Six Nations. Ireland won in South Africa for only the second time in the fixture’s history and won in France for just the 13th time in 114 years.
And yet, by the end of the year, there was general uproar about the clunkiness of Ireland’s performances in the Autumn Internationals. Success takes that toll. In the decades when Irish rugby was an underachieving underdog, those performances would have been given a God-help-us benediction. Which would we prefer?
Katie Taylor keeps getting the close calls that Leinster and McIlroy find so elusive. She keeps putting herself in winning positions too. Her resilience and drive and stamina and skill are outlandish. How many global pioneers in their sport have we produced? Maybe only Taylor.
It is extraordinary, though, that Kellie Harrington should come along at the same time. In the beginning she might have followed in Taylor’s footsteps, but soon she made her own path. Double Olympic champion now. Heading to Paris, she carried the same expectation as Wiffen and McClenaghan and O’Donovan and McCarthy; none of them buckled. “Dreams are heavy things,” wrote Laurence Arnholt in one of his children’s books. Grown-ups know that too.
The hurling championship was a glorious sunbeam in a cloudy summer. The All-Ireland final was a match of everlasting brilliance. Everything about it was heartening and uplifting. Armagh won the football All-Ireland as outsiders. They didn’t think like underdogs, though.
That cop-out is dead.
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