Our final thoughts on Ireland’s greatest Olympic Games.
On the first day, Mona McSharry touched the wall and found herself on the right side of a single hundredth of a second. She had flirted with quitting the sport a couple of years earlier and yet here she was, an Olympic bronze medallist, validating everything she had endured and also signalling to the rest of us that something was stirring.
On the third day, Kellie Harrington fixed another post-it note to the wall of her room in the athletes village. Her wife, Mandy, sent her a support package that included a card, photos, post-it notes and blu-tack. Every day Harrington wrote a positive message and fixed it to the wall.She rehearsed them all in the final moments before she left for the ring. Harrington returned later that night as a two-time Olympic medallist, winning her quarter-final to guarantee at least bronze.
On the sixth day, Rhys McClenaghan was asked what we all just learned about him. “It shows I’ve got balls”, he said. On the seventh day, Daniel Wiffen did not rest. A bronze medal in a race won in a new world record time and still we felt a little underwhelmed. Once that feeling dissipated, another took over: Olympic Gold medals are hard won. Wiffen has already won one. We’ve already won three. Kellie might yet deliver a fourth.
To cover this as a sports journalist is to constantly feel like you are violating laws of human decency. These athletes scrimp and save and sacrifice in obscurity for 207 weeks, pleading for coverage while we tell the world about the latest Leinster player who trusts his process and why Manchester United’s latest defeat is bad news for Erik ten Hag.
Kellie Harrington won her gold medal at Roland-Garros, a stage so grand and historic that it felt like a one-off reproach to the grubbiness that has enveloped amateur boxing. Having sank to her knees and slapped the canvas in her moment of triumph, she then stood up and started dancing. She danced and she danced and she danced. Zaur Antia jumped into the ring and he danced while Kellie danced and danced and danced like nobody was watching.
So maybe this is why it’s worth becoming an Olympian: they have carved themselves away from the world’s burble and spin by dedicating themselves to this one, tiny, infinitesimal thing in the firmament. Salwa Eid Naser finishes ahead of Rhasidat Adeleke. Morgan Treacy / INPHO Morgan Treacy / INPHO / INPHO
The World Anti-Doping Agency read this report and decided not to appeal the Chinese decision, despite the fact the original source of the substance was never found, and an explanation as to how a kitchen during Covid times was left so unclean that a substance could end up ingested by 23 different athletes.
Media outlets who should know better flung themselves into the story, accusing the IOC of an outrageous violation of the sanctity of female sports and of threatening the safety of the two boxers’ opponents. Amid the clamour and the outrage, facts were ignored, to the point the Boston Globe apologised for a headline incorrectly describing Khelif as transgender.
There are vital discussions to be had around intersex athletes in women’s sport, with the ultimate ambition to preserve the sanctity and safety of female sport. But personalising it two fighters on the word of the disgraced IBA during an Olympic Games is not the way to do it. We don’t know about the fighters’ respective biological make-ups: all we knew about this story is that we did not know enough to leap to any firm conclusions.
The worst place to watch the ceremony was from the ceremony: it was obviously designed for TV. Lady Gaga’s performance on steps leading to the Seine, for instance, was pre-recorded. Paris at least initially didn’t give the feeling of needing the Olympics. The metro closures and security measures and the traffic routing were maddening to a people who saw the Olympics as little other than an invasion of clumsy savages who can’t roll their rs and will wave wildly at waiters.
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