The term ‘minority sports’ isn’t one that anyone regards with affection. It’s up there with the awful ‘Tier 2’ that goes around rugby circles and the condescending ‘weaker counties’ tag that gets bandied about in hurling.
It’s at once demeaning and unhelpful but it is a moniker that, like it or not, holds an undeniable grain of truth. Sport, like everything else, has its hierarchy but even minority pursuits can be stratified into the haves and the have-nots.
Jenny Lehane was an international class taekwondo star whose ITF version of the sport isn’t part of the modern Olympic programme. It took a late switch to boxing for the Ashbourne woman to make it here to Paris.
Jenny Egan has been of Ireland’s most consistent and successful athletes on the global stage for two decades now. She has six World and European championship medals to show for it, but her favoured form of kayaking doesn’t exist within the five rings.
Them’s the breaks.
The IOC is an imposing skyscraper, its height and stature a symbol of its permanence, but it operates a revolving door policy at the ground floor when it comes to sports and disciplines, so Ireland’s medal opportunities may well look very different by the time we reach Los Angeles in 2028.
Boxing and lightweight rowing were responsible for 73% of this country’s Olympic medal haul between Beijing in 2008 and Tokyo three years ago. The first of those is not currently on the programme for LA while the latter played out sits final act in the Games last Friday.
Still, no need for panic just yet. There’s good news here too.
Of the seven medals Ireland have claimed in their record 2024 haul, only two came from those two sources. You don’t need to convert that into percentages to see that the reliance on this pair of traditional powerhouses has dropped.
What hasn’t been noted much about the seven medals here, but absolutely should be, is how this bounty has been claimed through the most varied means yet. Three sports contributed to the six podiums in London in 2012. That’s up to four now and could yet be more again before we’re done.
Rhys McClenaghan won Ireland’s first ever Olympic medal in gymnastics, a gold. Daniel Wiffen and Mona McSharry, with three medals between them, confirmed the stratospheric rise in competitiveness we have brought to the swimming pool in the last decade.
Show jumping, golf, rugby and sailing all came close to contributing to the end count, but it goes without saying that the loss of boxing to its endless global and civil war would be a massive blow to Team Ireland should it happen.
So much needs to start going right outside the ring for that fate to be avoided – and the consequences of a no-show would be felt far more keenly at grassroots level in a sport that does so much for Lowe-income communities – but there are reasons for hope in rowing.
High-performance director Antonio Maurogiovanni identified Ireland’s paucity of ‘heavyweight’ crews early on in his seven-year term in charge and the process of future-proofing for that pre-dates Paris and even Tokyo.
The bronze medal won by the women’s four in the 2021 Games, the ‘Big Strong Girls’, was a very visible sign of changing times and how the Irish branch was going with the shifting wind rather than leaning into it. Then Philip Doyle and Daire Lynch won a first ever men’s heavy Olympic medal only last week in the men’s double sculls.
Paul O’Donovan and Fintan McCarthy have already given notice of plans to switch to the heavier discipline having won back-to-back lightweight double sculls Olympic titles. How many others follow is another thing.
“We have examples of lightweights that can race in heavyweight,” said rowing’s high-performance chief Antonio Maurogiovanni in the run up to these 2024 Games.
“It’s not easy but at the moment we are focused on this year and not much thinking about the next cycle. I would say that we have the possibility, the door will be open for whatever lightweight wants to go in the heavyweight, but that depends on post-Paris.”
Coastal rowing will replace the lightweights in LA and there’s more encouraging news here in the fact that Ireland has already proven itself more than adept at this version of the sport, even if it isn’t in the exact form we will see in 2028.
Monika Dukarska, who rowed with Aileen Crowley in the women’s pair in Tokyo in 2021, has won nine World Championships medals in coastal rowing in three different decades and across solo, double sculls and mixed doubles.
Ronan Byrne, who partnered Philip Doyle in the double sculls in Japan three years ago, won a mixed gold with Dukarska only last year, and there are more individuals and crews who have enjoyed similar success on that same circuit.
There are two main disciplines, a long version which isn’t all that Olympic-friendly, and the beach sprint variety which begins with athletes running down the sand, rowing a short distance and then sprinting back up the beach to the finish line.
If the latter sounds gimmicky then the powers-that-be are eager to point out that “evidence of coastal rowing goes back thousands of years, to around 1900 BC in Ancient Egypt. The competitive version dates to the equally ancient 1980s with a first World Championships held in 2007.
“Beach sprints, even though it is new, ticks a lot of boxes of what the IOC are looking for,” Sarah Pidgen, who represents Canada, told her national federation’s website. “It is fast-paced, and really exciting for the spectator.
“But it is also more accessible for other countries that have typically not been able to compete in flatwater rowing. It opens the opportunities for anyone who has access to a coastline, or any body of water to compete.”
World Rowing has made noises about how it will deliver “genuine innovation” to the Games and embrace the beach culture that we all associate with vast stretches of the Californian coast. True or not, its up to Ireland and everyone else to adapt.
