OLYMPIC HOMECOMING:THE EARLY part of this week was Taylor-made for a public display of affection. Had we only got our act together and marked the arrival of our Olympic athletes on Monday, the day they actually came home, things could have been so different.
The skies would have been blue, the winds warm and the sun bright. And the crowds would have poured into Dublin city centre. But it wasn’t to be. By the time the Olympic Council of Ireland and Dublin City Council finished their “Will we? Won’t we?” shuffle over the nature and scale of the event, Met Éireann was warning of apocalyptic weather caused by an “unusually deep depression”.
The forecasters weren’t wrong and the driving rain put many fair-weather fans off the official homecoming outside the Mansion House on Dawson Street. All told, about 2,000 people showed up. While the weather was miserable, the mood was anything but.
MC Des Cahill was doing okay until he suggested the crowd lower their umbrellas as the Olympians took the stage. He didn’t say why but implied this mad act would be appreciated by the athletes. He was probably more concerned the brollies were interfering with the line of sight of the RTÉ cameras. It is to their credit that so many ignored him.
Paddy Kelly from Francis Street in Dublin was one of them. He had brought his niece Melissa (8) into town for the occasion. “It’s great to be here and I don’t care about the weather,” he said, holding his brolly aloft. Melissa didn’t care about the rain either. She was here to see one person. “Katie is brilliant. I watched the fight and she’s a brilliant boxer.”
Would she consider following in her footsteps? “Ah no, I might get hurt. I prefer Irish dancing.”
A deep depression caused the bad weather but the most depressed man in town was “Willie the Tout” – as he asked to be called. Willie looked miserable standing outside the House of Ireland holding a few limp Tricolours. “There is no one effin here,” he said. “The weather is brutal. I’ve had this effin stock in my shed for five effin years and I won’t be shifting any of it today,” he said morosely.
Kelly Coogan from Kilkenny also looked under the weather, sporting an array of bruises and cuts. She did not, however, need medical attention. A student of a make-up college off Grafton Street, she and her classmates had given themselves a battered look in a peculiar homage to our boxing medallists.
Solicitor Orla Crowe is a massive Taylor fan and set up TVs in her office so her colleagues wouldn’t miss a moment of her bouts. She has recently taken up white-collar boxing and would have been outside the Mansion House no matter how bad the weather. “A lot more of us were due to come down today but they all bailed because of the rain,” she said disapprovingly.
The first sporting hero on stage was, inexplicably, Ruby Walsh, a jockey with no Olympic connections apart from the fact he watched a lot of it on telly. He told the crowd that an injury picked up during the Galway Races meant he had plenty of time to become expert in the likes of Taekwondo and sailing in recent weeks.
“There are two gold medals resting in Dublin at the moment,” Cahill said. And before you could blurt out: “Michelle Smith still has her three golds, Des,” Ronnie Delany and Michael Carruth were beside him. Delany, who won the 1,500m in Melbourne in 1956, welcomed Taylor into “the golden circle”. Minister of State for Sport Michael Ring said a few nice words about volunteers while the Olympic council’s Pat Hickey pointed to the heavens and said: “We’re used to this. When we came back from Atlanta in 1996 we had the same atrocious weather conditions.”
When Katie Taylor was eventually introduced, an almighty roar went up. She was her usual modest self and spoke about how nervous she was on the stage and how humbled she had been by the response to her medal. Then, unexpectedly, she said she was thinking of going off to Ibiza with her fellow boxers. “I’d probably come back a raging alcoholic,” the teetotaller joked.
“I am still overwhelmed by the response to the win,” Taylor said later. “I know now I did something really special for my country. I didn’t realise what was going on at home until I got back. I can’t wait to relax a bit but I am not complaining about the attention. I haven’t stopped crying for the last few days, to be honest. I am a bit of a wuss.”
