It was late on Wednesday night and the lights were dancing on the Champs Élysées. From the Grand Palais on one side of the Seine down to the Eiffel Tower on the other, people milled around in their thousands. Nobody seemed to be heading anywhere in particular. They were mostly just being at the Olympics.
Off to the side of a humongous hangar selling official Olympic merch, a dozen young Irish people were cackling and jigging about the place as a small woman in a South Korea tracksuit tried to get them to stand still for a photo. On closer inspection, you could see that one of them was Jack Woolley, the 25-year-old from Tallaght who had been knocked out of the taekwondo competition about 90 minutes previously. Now here he was, just another tiny pinball bouncing around the Olympic bumpers.
So much of high level sport is purposeful, painstaking and paranoid. If you’re not preparing for the next thing, you’re worrying about why not. You’re always behind, catching up and where you think you’re supposed to be. And then it’s over, and you don’t know what to be at.
Woolley and his friends started doing this thing with their fingers for the photo, as if they were trying to snap them shut on a passing fly. The Korean lady found this hilarious and joined in, getting someone else to take the photo while she stood fingersnapping with her new Irish gang. When it was done, everybody hugged it out. Woolley stood off to the side and smiled, bathing in the simple pleasure of larking about on a night of long deferred freedom.
The Games are almost over and everyone is doing their own version of the Champs Élysée dance. For Team Ireland, seven medals at an Olympics for the first time in history allows the steps to feel a little lighter and the music a little more up-tempo. The level of success in Paris has been unprecedented – in the proper, literal sense of the word.
Paul O’Donovan and Fintan McCarthy. Daniel Wiffen. Rhys McClenaghan. Kellie Harrington. Names to conjure with long into the future because of what they did here over the past fortnight.
Four gold medals has never happened before. Medals in four different sports has never happened before. A gymnastics medal had never happened before. A successful defence of an Olympic gold wasn’t quite unprecedented but it hadn’t happened in 88 years and then it happened twice in four days.
We saw our greatest ever Olympian take a medal at his third Games in a row. We saw our greatest ever Olympic boxer finish up with a record that reads: 2 Olympics, 2 Golds, 8 Fights, 8 Wins, for a combined score of 36-4 on all judges’ cards. We saw a new hope in the pool, for most of us now the greatest Irish Olympic swimmer, regardless of what the record books say.
Beyond the golds, we saw bronze for Mona McSharry, which she couldn’t have been more delighted with. We saw bronzes too for Wiffen and the rowing pair Philip Doyle and Daire Lynch – and it’s a measure of their standards that they very much could have been more delighted in the moment.
Close calls? We had a few. Rhasidat Adeleke turned into the home straight in third but couldn’t hold it to the line in the 400m. Liam Jegou put in the run of his life down the canoe slalom course and had the silver medal in his grasp, only to lose it by brushing the final gate with his left shoulder blade. Robert Dixon and Seán Waddilove spent the whole week at the front of the skiff field but a botched start in the medal race meant they finished fourth. Rory McIlroy came steaming through the field to get into medal position before dunking his approach to the 15th green.
In their own way, each of them paid the ultimate homage to what Wiffen, Harrington, McClenaghan, O’Donovan, McCarthy, McSharry, Lynch and Doyle achieved. They were proof positive that you can’t pox your way into an Olympic medal. You have one day, every four years, to make sure that you do everything right. One home straight, one dipped shoulder blade, one held start, one extra yard on a wedge – that’s all it would have taken for any of them to make the podium.
That’s what makes the Olympics such an intense experience. From the very start, the margins were tiny. It feels like a decade ago now but the men’s rugby Sevens team threw away winning positions against both New Zealand and Fiji before the opening ceremony had even begun. Ben Healy put in a heroic dig in the cycling road race but couldn’t sustain it. Woolley was a kick and a punch away from a bronze-medal match.
For all the good vibes, there were plenty of not-so-near misses too. Harrington aside, the boxers had another desperate Games. If we take her results out of the past three Olympic tournaments, the Irish record reads: 20 boxers, 32 fights, nine wins, 23 defeats. We can ask questions about the judging until the cows come home but one solitary win between the other nine boxers in Paris is a paltry return.
They weren’t alone in coming up short. Not for the first time, the much-heralded showjumpers got into position for a medal push but didn’t deliver when it mattered most. McIlroy’s late charge notwithstanding, the golfers didn’t really show up – Shane Lowry conceded he was playing for pride after day two and neither of the women made any impression. Four boats in rowing finals had never happened before but you could still divine a sense of missed opportunities from them in the end.
So. That’s a lot of names and sports and numbers, along with a fair smattering of ifs and ands and maybes. The four gold medals will take all the headlines and rightfully so. Patrick Kielty will give it holly on the first Late Late of the autumn and every bit of it will be deserved. But when it comes to the nitty-gritty of what it all adds up to, it’s worth taking a beat and looking at the whole board.
The reality is that seven medals, historic and all as they are, is pretty much in line with what most people thought would be par for these Olympics. If you were told beforehand that Ireland would win four gold medals, you would most likely have nailed all four. Of the others, only McSharry was a bolt from the blue. We expected her to make a final but a medal seemed slightly fanciful.
For all that the Olympics are wild and crazy and unpredictable, there are some things about all sports that are fundamental. Every country has talented athletes. When enough of those athletes are supported properly, some will eventually deliver the goods. Ireland is a wealthy country that has finally, over the past decade, come around to the idea of putting appropriate levels of funding and facilities into Olympic sport. There’s no great mystery here.
This past fortnight is, broadly, what was supposed to happen. All eight of the Irish medal winners – four rowers, two swimmers, a boxer and a gymnast – are on the top rate of Sport Ireland funding of €40,000. Outside direct funding of the athletes, high-performance sport gets more than €10m every year from Sport Ireland. There are still huge gains to be made, particularly in the realm of coaching and facilities. But the Irish system is, finally, fit for purpose.
And not a minute too soon. If you were to create lab conditions for the perfect Olympics in which an Irish team could thrive, no better city than Paris for it to happen. The proximity to home has made these the last Games for the next decade that Irish people can casually drop in and out of. That made a difference, both on the ground and in the stands. Friends, family, support staff – there was an ease of access for athletes that won’t be the same in LA or Brisbane.
Beyond our own small corner of the quilt, Paris has been a beguiling place to have the Games. Very often, the experience of being at one Olympics is in many respects indistinguishable from the next. The IOC puts its own brand of bubble wrap around the host city and for the duration of the fortnight, you find yourself walking around Olympicsville.
Paris has not been like that at all. Through it all, the city has remained determinedly Parisian, adamantly, recognisably itself. The choices of venues have been inspired, from the beach volleyball at the Eiffel Tower to the showjumping at Versailles and the conversion of Racing 92′s home ground into the most incredible swimming pool/stadium in history.
But beyond hosting the sports themselves, the sense of a city knowing exactly how special it is has shone through. Paris doesn’t need the Olympics to make it feel important or global or significant. Mostly, it sees the deal the other way around. Not every city could pull that off.
And so we go home, frayed and exhausted from the most intense couple of weeks sport has to offer. Everyone’s Olympics ends its own way. For some, it’s Tom Cruise jumping off the roof of the Stade de France in the closing ceremony. For others, it’s fingersnapping on the Champs Élysées with a giggling new Korean friend. It’s a riot of emotions, a showcase not just for all your talents and athleticism but for all your doubts and vulnerabilities too.
It’s probably for the best that, pandemics notwithstanding, it only happens every four years.
