There is someone you need to meet. Allow us. Finbarr Kirwan is the most powerful Irish person in the wide world of sport.
He will flinch at the introduction. Ignore his deflections. His official title is Chief of Olympic Sport USA. It means that Team USA’s performance at the Summer and Winter Games start and finish on his desk. For everything that happens in-between plausible deniability is not available as a defence.
How did he get there? Have you a minute? Kirwan came through the ditches and briars of Irish sports politics. More than 20 years ago he was appointed as the first high performance manager of what is now Sport Ireland.
In a real sense, it was a pioneering role. There was no culture in Ireland of high performance planning, or the thinking that underpins it. Most of the federations had an institutional tolerance for failure and were set in their ways. Very few of them welcomed the intrusion of an outsider effectively telling them how things should be done.
For the next ten years Kirwan’s mission was to change their minds. Some of the resistance was intensely political. The Olympic Council of Ireland, as they were known then, were one of the fiercest opponents of change. That fight was also about territory and influence.
Paul McDermott and John Treacy in Sport Ireland were Kirwan’s strongest allies and, ultimately, they won the argument. In the Athens Olympic cycle, before the high performance programme was launched, Irish athletes won 54 medals at European and World competitions, from junior through to elite level. In the next Olympic cycle that figure rose to 70; in the London cycle it hit 163.
At the London Olympics Ireland won six medals, beating the previous best from Melbourne in 1956. A threshold had been crossed. For Irish sport, there was no going back.
“There’s absolutely no way I would have been able to do the job in America without having worked for ten years in Ireland,” says Kirwan now.
“There’s absolutely no way I could have done the job without learning the skills because a lot of it is about human interaction and trying to problem solve in stressful situations.
“Is there conflict over here [in America]? Yeah, plenty of conflict. The human dynamics are not that different. People are people. The key thing for me is if somebody has a bit of curiosity about them and leaves their ego at the door a lot of problems can be solved.”
Shortly after the London Olympics, Kirwan left Ireland. The United States Olympic Committee [USOC] were looking for a High Performance manager to lead five sports on the summer Olympics programme: athletics, swimming, golf, weightlifting and equestrian. At the Rio Games USA won 121 medals, more than half of which were delivered by the sports in Kirwan’s portfolio.
After Rio, he was promoted to the role of senior director, with responsibility for performance innovation. What did that mean?
“One of the things we realised going into Rio was that a lot of other countries had done excellent work in identifying an edge whereas we relied heavily on just a lot of talent coming from the NCAA [University] system. Part of what we realised is that we had fallen behind with our efforts in technology and analytics and so forth. We don’t get any government funding so we had to source donor funding. We were able to raise about 20 million dollars.”
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His performance led to further promotions. Before Tokyo he was made Chief of Summer Sports; after Tokyo he was made Chief of Olympic Sports, summer and winter. With every change in altitude the air was thinner. Nobody straps an oxygen tank to your back.
“The weight of expectation is certainly bigger. There’s an expectation that we win, and that’s it. There’s no ambiguity around that. You know, I’m okay [with that]. I enjoy the pressure that comes with it because I get to be around the best in the world at what they do. I think if you came into it with a big ego you would get called out very quickly.
“That was the thing I was most impressed with when I got over first. I thought there might be a lot of egos around the place and that’s not the case at all. If it’s there it gets eliminated immediately because people realise that they’ll get called out on their bullshit basically. Our job is to be behind the curtain supporting the athletes and putting them in a position to succeed.”
For the Games here in Paris we’re unapologetic about it. We want to win the Olympics. Gold medal count. Overall medal count. Number of medalists
When Kirwan was being interviewed for his first job with USOC they were especially curious about the transformation in Irish boxing. USA had come home from the London Olympics without a boxing medal while, for the second Games in a row, Ireland had been one of the big success stories in the Olympic ring.
Boxing’s high performance unit had been the biggest battleground of Kirwan’s ten years with Sport Ireland. By the time he finished explaining what had happened, and how the impediments were overcome, they were fixated on Billy Walsh.
“We talked about Billy at length. They said, ‘Right, get on a plane, let’s try to get him over’. I met him in The Winding Stair in Dublin for dinner and we got the deal done. Billy’s still here. He has done incredible work with the boxers. He has changed the culture in the sport here in the US. Billy has been a brilliant part of the story.”
Just before the Paris Games USOC announced a donation of $25 million from a Californian family. Without government funding the challenge of being self-sufficient on a scale that will deliver success is a never-ending challenge.
Between summer and winter sports the guts of $100 million is consumed every year. USOC has a full-time team whose job is to identify potential donors. At that point Kirwan enters the process.
“My job is to tell the performance story and tell them what their money will do for Team USA and how it will impact Team USA. We eat what we kill basically.”
They have sent a team of 593 athletes to Paris. The medals have already started to flow. The performance target is plain and unconditional.
“For the Games here in Paris we’re unapologetic about it. We want to win the Olympics. Gold medal count. Overall medal count. Number of medalists.”
For the last 11 years Kirwan, his wife Annabel, and their two children have lived in Colorado, at the foot of the Rocky Mountains. After the London Olympics, staying with Sport Ireland would have been easy. Much of the heavy lifting had been done. Instead, he jumped off a cliff.
“When I graduated from UCC I had no idea what I was going to do. If you said to me that 30 years later I was going to be running Olympic sport for Team USA I’d have gone, ‘You’re mad’. I took a risk. It was a risk. There are no jobs for life in our environment. You’re judged on your merits and you’re judged on performance. I felt at the time it was a risk worth taking. It’s paid off.”
Every medal Ireland wins in Paris has his name in the small print. Just look closely.
