The Official Olympics Thread (with the consent of the Chinese Gov.)

[ONeill]

Jaysus thon British effort during the closing ceremony was dire in comparison to the overall Chinese effort.

[orangeman]

One word -  SPECTACULAR !

[Niall Quinn]

When you consider Olympic medal performance per capita, India would want to take a long hard look at itself.
With an estimated 2008 population of 1,132,446,000 you would have expected a return more in line with China's 100 medals than Ireland's 3, which is what they delivered. That's one medal every 377 million people, and places them just behind the Dominican, Estonia and Portugal in the medal standings.
Thank God for the Men's 10m Air Rifle, or it could have been really embarrassing.

[Hardy]

I think India has other priorities than funding elite athletes when it comes to making investment decisions with the public finances.

[Niall Quinn]

We're talking about a country with 189 times the population of Ireland - even with zero funding or encouragement, I'd still expect to see more than a handful with an uncanny ability to toss a javelin or run 26 miles.

[stevo-08]

Im not a fan of the Sunday Independent but stumbled across this yesterday. An interesting article about the Irish boxers, Gary Keegan (the high performance director) & their preparation for the olympics. It might explain why we fared well in the boxing but failed to make any impact in Track & Field.


Bigger battles to be fought
Sunday August 24 2008

IT won't change him. Of that he is certain. Kenny Egan stood in the basement of the Workers' Gymnasium on Friday evening and invited those present to shake the hand of the man who had qualified for the Olympic light heavyweight final. He rapped and he rolled. He bounced and jabbed witticisms into the night air. Same old Kenneth Egan. Same as he always will be.

He had just beaten Sunderland's Tony Jeffries to book his place in this morning's final against the "Chinaman" Xiaoping Chang. In four fights he had waltzed through the tournament, conceding a miserly seven points along the way. He was there on the day it began and he is here on the day it ends. He came to Beijing, he said, to lead his team and to do his country proud. He has been as good as his word.

You think it's been easy though? Kenny Egan would like to tell you a little story. A few days ago he met an Australian boxer in the Olympic Village and heard him whinge about how hard it had become just to get to the Olympics. In the old days, he said, you just had to win your national title. Now you had to negotiate a path through the Oceanic championships. For a time Egan indulged him. And then he let rip.

"I gave him stink. I said are you serious? Sure all we've got to do is beat the Russians and the Ukrainians and all sorts. That's the Australians, though. That's how small-minded they are. They win their nationals and they expect to be at the Olympics. That's why they come here and win nothing at the same time."

The beauty of Kenny Egan's story has been in the journey as much as in the sweet fruition of the past two weeks. It lies in those who refused to tell him he was a legend when he was winning eight senior national titles or when he was top eight in the world in 2001 and 2003, but who grabbed him by the lapels and told him he could be better than that if he really wanted to be.

And now he is. This time two years ago he was working as a waiter in the Citywest Hotel, serving dinner to Tiger Woods and his wife during the Ryder Cup. Now he is on the cusp of Olympic glory, of being a champion himself. And when you stripped away the fame and the money and the power, all those things that rob sport of its purity, what was the difference between himself and Woods?

The slavish devotion, the hard toil and the sacrifices: he'd done it all too. And, for Kenny Egan, Friday was payback time. It was about his night, about his dreams and his fulfilment. He thought about the road travelled. A boxer since he was eight. A senior international at 16. A national champion at 18. "I'm the only one left from that time and look at me now. In an Olympic final. It's a story in itself. That's dedication. I owed it to myself. All that hard work. Well done Kenneth."

HE says it was for himself, a reward for all those ascetic, sweat-filled years, but there were others too. His mother who was always there when he came home from another tournament with a bag of dirty washing and a ravenous hunger for a home-cooked meal. The Sports Council who kept funding him even though there were those in his own sport who claimed he'd never deliver. John McKeown who picked him up when he felt low after last year's World Championships and offered him badly-needed support.

And then there was Gary Keegan. Egan spoke of how much it hurt them that Keegan, the team's high performance director, wasn't included as part of the official boxing delegation. "But there's nothing I can do," he said. "I'm here as an athlete." If it sounded selfish, Keegan would have appreciated the sentiment. Five years ago he came to the job knowing that's what he needed to instil. For all they were a team, the boxers needed to develop a selfish streak, Kenny Egan most of all.

If the journey to Beijing had a beginning, it was in a room in the headquarters of the Irish Sports Council at the back end of 2002. Keegan was there that day, presenting a low-key report on coach education in boxing and somehow left with the task of devising a plan that might bring Olympic boxing medals. He had four days to put a strategy in place. D-day was looming.

They didn't know it then but they'd found the right man: a driven thirty-something businessman who knew you got nothing in life unless you pushed hard for it. In his various coaching roles Keegan had bossed people who were older and far more experienced than him, trampling on toes as he went. He never minded. Somewhere down the line, he figured, he might pay for his brashness. It was a risk he had to take.

He started with a vision and a willingness to walk through walls to implement it. The first step was appointing Billy Walsh as head coach early in 2003, the next was finding suitable back-up. Through an acquaintance he heard about Zaur Antia, a Georgian who had been six times welterweight champion in his homeland. During his interview the panel baulked at Antia's poor grasp of English. Gently, Keegan nudged them along.

"I set each of the candidates a practical task in the gym and when you saw him on the floor that's when Zaur came alive," Keegan says. "I knew that was his home. He knew where he was. Boxing is a universal language and the boxers responded quickly. I knew there and then we'd found the right guy."

Because they wanted a Year Zero feel to the plan they purloined a wall of the gym and called it the roll of honour wall. As it was blank they inscribed the names of Michael Carruth and Wayne McCullough. "Just to have something up there." At first the boxers hated it. Then one by one they started winning and the first thing that greeted them in the morning was their own name. The wall became their friend.

One name above all stood out. Kenny Egan. No figure epitomised what was so good about Irish boxing and yet so fragile. Keegan had never seen an athlete with so much burning ambition. Egan would return from EU or European championships laden down with medals and dismiss them as if they were trinkets he'd picked up on some foreign market stall. "I'm not interested," he'd say. "I want the Olympics."

Athens had come and gone without his presence, though, and his mental fortitude came under question. Around the gym they regarded him as the most successful senior Irish international of all time and that bracket included Carruth. Without the Olympics, Egan refused to accept the honour, though, and over the years they watched his internal struggle play itself out.

The resolution came perilously late. Egan had gone to the world championships in Chicago last year, Olympic qualification the least of his targets. Somehow he conspired to lose heavily against the Croat Marijo Sivolija in the last 16 even though they'd been level entering the fourth round. Pescara in February brought the next round of qualifiers. He was beaten again. The pressure rocketed.

Athens in April was the final qualifier, last chance saloon. To try something different they brought in Phil Moore, a sports psychologist with the Institute of Sport. Moore sat in on a session between Egan and his regular psychologist, Gerry Hussey, and identified a couple of basic factors they might look at. They wondered if it could be that simple and, as it turned out, it was.

Finally they had cracked the code. Egan won gold in Athens and booked his ticket for Beijing. A short time later he went to the EU championships in Poland, short of full fitness, but still cruised to a gold medal. The change astonished them. He was living the mantra they had tried to instil all those years back; dealing with now rather than what lay up the road.

On Tuesday Keegan sat in the Workers' Gymnasium and watched Egan come out for his quarter-final bout against Washington Silva of Brazil. The fighter's face was red and flush. His eyes were clear and focussed. Then the bell went, he threw his first shot and Keegan knew. "The speed of the shot, the power behind the punch. He was ready and committed. I knew we'd be fine."

Darren Sutherland was different. Where Egan was street-wise and sparkled with Neilstown wit, Sutherland bubbled with a mix of energy and bookish learning. He was self-sufficient and possessed a voice, a curious mix of his Caribbean and Dublin roots, which always demanded to be heard. They could talk to him about preparation and nutrition but the chances were that Sutherland would already have passed them by. He was brash and cocky but he had the sporting knowledge to go with it.

Keegan was a coach at St Saviour's Boxing club when Sutherland walked through the door 11 years ago, a spiky 15-year-old kid. He asked him his name and what he wanted from the sport. "I'm Darren Sutherland," the kid replied. "And I want to be world champion." Not just any world champion, though. He wanted to be the first black Irish world champion.

The road to Beijing had taken him through some potted terrain. A torrid three-year spell in Brendan Ingle's Wincobank gym in Sheffield almost turned him off the game for life. A serious eye injury in 2005 when he had rediscovered his love for boxing under the wing of the high-performance programme nearly finished him for good.

When he lost to British middleweight James Degale in Friday's semi-final, there were those who said Sutherland appeared too happy afterwards but they forgot where he had come from and where he was going. Soon he'll wrap up his sports science degree in DCU and embrace the pro ranks again, a stronger fighter and a better man than he was when he went to Ingle all those years ago. It is where they know he has always belonged.

Paddy Barnes was different again. Barnes was hard to penetrate and not simply because of his thick north Belfast accent. He'd come to them from Gerry Storey's Holy Family club in the city and risen through the cadet and junior ranks under Jim Moore. Initially Barnes turned no heads. There was nothing about him that suggested he would go to the World Championships last year and become the first boxer to qualify for Beijing.

In time they would come to realise that, maybe, they were the problem. Not Barnes. As a junior they sparred him with cadets who were much younger than him because they didn't think he was ready for his peers. And the cadets caused him problems. They didn't see that he wasn't motivated to spar them. They didn't see that he wasn't challenged by them. They just didn't see.

"He probably didn't feel he had a relationship enough with us to say I'm better than this," says Keegan. "We'd have said okay 'let's see how good you are'. We didn't see his uniqueness. That was a failing on our behalf. I'm not trying to make excuses but it was a rare thing."

He was a late addition for Chicago and, at a training camp in France before they left, they finally saw Barnes come out of his shell. Barnes was sparring with a seasoned French fighter, cutting him to pieces. Keegan was in the ring refereeing, Walsh outside looking in. Both stopped and looked at each other. "I'm looking at Billy. Billy's looking at me. What the f**k's happening here?"

Getting to know Barnes has been their pleasure and their privilege. Keegan tells a story of what it is that makes him unique. Before the Games they brought their five boxers to Vladivostok to spar with the Russians at the toughest training camp in the world. When he saw their living quarters -- four small rooms for 13 people -- Keegan blanched and promised them he would arrange a hotel if they liked.

In one room Egan, Sutherland and John Joe Nevin were squeezed tight against each other while a big, old fridge beat out a cacophonous symphony in the background. Not a bother, Egan told him, a bit more space and he would be happy. Sutherland and Nevin looked up and gave him the thumbs up.

He moved to the next room where Barnes and Johnny Joyce were inspecting their quarters. "Johnny looks up and shrugs, no problem. Then Paddy stands up and says, 'get me a hotel'. But that's Paddy. I won't go with the status quo. I put him in the hotel with the physio and the doctor. Kenny had his space. Problem solved."

The plan in Beijing was that Keegan's apartment, near the Olympic Green, would be their bolt-hole outside the chaos of the Village. From here he was able to maintain a contact of sorts. When Joyce lost his second-round contest to the Dominican Felix Diaz, he visited the apartment and they mulled over things for a couple of hours. He did the same with Nevin the following day.

Every evening Hussey and physio Scott Murphy would return from the Village bringing stories and updates. No day passed when he wouldn't speak to Walsh at least three times. Like that they got by but three medals still couldn't gloss over the hurt Keegan felt and the pain his team felt for him. He wasn't there to lead his team and the wound will always run deep.

WHEN the history of the Irish team at these Games is written it will record that five working-class kids did themselves, their sport and their country proud while, once more, it was besmirched by the grubby hands of politicians and those in sport who relentlessly pursue agendas.

From the start he knew there were little pockets of dissent. His first move had been to close the gym for three months and that had rattled cages. Only those within the tightly-knit high-performance group could gain access. They had to get to know the boxers and the boxers had to get to know them, a harsh but necessary business. "We got terrible stick," Keegan remembers. "People saying 'who do they think they are'?"

He knew certain people would be put out. He'd been a volunteer himself, racking up 100,000 miles on a brand new Citreon Xsara in 18 months, thus destroying its value. He knew how people would feel, knew the questions they would ask. Before Vladivostok he had to make a presentation to the board, justifying costs and the inclusion of certain personnel. Still answering questions, still responding to doubters.

After they returned from Chicago last year with only one boxer qualified for Beijing, one board member had called for his head. In a sea of disapproval he was glad of the unwavering support from IABA president, Dominic O'Rourke, and of the backing of the Sports Council. "Don't worry," Finbarr Kirwin, the Council's high performance co-ordinator told him. "You'll still do it."

And although he persevered there was still one final indignity to face. The story of his non-accreditation brewed for months but didn't percolate the tight confines of the high-performance unit as Keegan was anxious his plight wouldn't disrupt his fighters' preparations for the Games. His opponents had one remaining card and he was shocked to hear of the blameless Jim Walsh being selected as manager of the team in his stead.

"It has been a very difficult time," Keegan says. "As high performance director you expect to lead teams into Games and I didn't. I missed two Olympic Games. When I missed Athens I thought this isn't going to happen again because the powers that be won't allow it. The Athens Review Committee highlighted it. So did Sydney. We arrive in Beijing and it's ignored again. It's very disappointing for me, personally and professionally."

He imagines there are people within his sport who will find it difficult to celebrate their achievements and the notion troubles and mildly depresses him. He's happy, though, that his troubles didn't affect the team's composure or its ability to perform under intense pressure. On Tuesday he heard Egan mention him in his post-fight interview and tears formed in his eye. They met afterwards outside the doping control room and shared a long embrace.

"You see we've kept very close," he says. "Even though they cut me out of it, they haven't managed to separate us. I'm proud of that. We'd worked too long and hard to be blown off course."

On Friday night he shared a quiet moment with Walsh and they reflected on the road they'd travelled. "Gary," Walsh asked, "why have all the pieces just fallen into place? I wasn't stressed today. I was so relaxed." Keegan told him why it was so. "Because your protégé was relaxed. You knew everything was right. Everything fell into place at the right time."

It wasn't an accident, though. Their story was a reflection of that.

[thejuice]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/olympics/taekwondo/7578828.stm

Paul Galvin eat yer heart out!!

[gerry]

I wonder will he get a open top bus tour through Belfast



Belfast man tops world at rock, paper, scissors


World domination has eventually proved to be child's play for the Irish in Beijing after a handy Belfast man took home a gold medal.

Mark Cleland, 24, sliced through the global competition to win the international rock, paper, scissors games.

Local and national qualifying tournaments drew thousands of competitors from across the world.

The winners were given a trip for two to the Olympic Games and the chance to take part in the global competition.

Mr Cleland said: "Facing off against the finest rock, paper, scissors players in the world was an intense challenge that pushed my skills to the limit.

"I tried to look for patterns in my opponents' throws, and in the end, they played right into my hands."

Mark beat 31 rivals in the Irish final in Dublin last May to win the chance to represent Ireland at the Beijing championships.

There he defeated Canada's Pablo Sebastian Gatica in the final on August 23, while Sean Sears from the US was awarded the bronze medal in the first-ever Budweiser International Rock, Paper, Scissors Federation Championship.

"We set out with Budweiser to find the most talented rock, paper, scissors players in the world and Mark proved to be a cut above the rest," said Matti Leshem, founder and Commissioner of the USA Rock, Paper, Scissors League and International Rock Paper Scissors Federation.

Club Bud, a Budweiser-sponsored nightclub that hosted parties throughout the 2008 Olympic Games, was the venue for the championship.