Its 25 years since Stephen Roche won the Tour de France and there is still no velodrome in Dublin.

It’s 20 years since Englands Chris Boardman won gold in cycling at the Barcelona Olympics and the British government built a velodrome in every large UK city.

They’re reaping the rewards of that policy now, Team GB dominates world cycling.

But here in Ireland the National Lottery profits are used as a slush fund for politicians, not for realizing a vision like they do in the UK

The ISC won’t even recognise the NGB for Olympic Rifle and Pistol shooting – the NTSA – let alone support them. This is despite shooters from the NTSA bringing home international medals for Ireland this year in competitions against the same people who’ve just won Olympic medals in the past few weeks; despite representing Ireland in the Atlanta and Sydney Games; and despite the NTSA having worked with the ISC for years while under a now-defunct umbrella body.

And their individual carding grants, which Tracey boasts can be given to athletes even if there’s a problem with their NGB, aren’t actually possible to win for rifle shooters every year (to get the top level of funding, you have to have won an Olympic medal in the previous year – so you could get the 30k grant next year if you had a medal now, but you wouldn’t get it for 2014 because you wouldn’t have won a medal in 2013. Efforts to have the criteria replaced with something more sane, fair and usable have been stalled and rebuffed for years. And just two years ago, the ISC stopped the national qualification of two of our coaches because of the NGB recognition problem that the ISC were themselves the cause of – even though those two coaches were already recognised at a higher level by the international governing body of the sport and are the two most successful coaches in our sport at the moment.

Frankly, while the individual people in the High Performance Unit do their best, the top table in the ISC needs a bit of a mental realignment so the ISC becomes more about the Sport and less about the Council….

Hardly a definitive benchmark – seems to me that all we can infer there is that India did appallingly bad.

Don’t worry, they’ll have something different to moan about tomorrow. Though if there was a gold medal for moaning, Irish people would get gold, silver and bronze…

A bit more than twice the entire funding for the Irish Olympic programme if the figure of eleven million I’d heard was accurate…

Excellent post and if we can link it all into investment in education we will prosper not just in sports but in our general health and well being. This will result in less funding requirements in health. Education+sport = investment in our youth. Think on Enda and Eamon.

@ Shane: Michael Ring made the same point yesterday, albeit rather poorly.

Golf will in fact be at the next Olympics. And while I agree with what your saying, the Government doesn’t have an unlimited sports budget and not every sport can be funded. And GAA games, soccer and rugby are by far the most popular sports in Ireland it would seem – so obviously should get the lions share of funding.

If popularity dictates funding priority, rather than say, performance levels or participation levels, you’ll have all the money going to the sport with the most fans; which is not necessarily the best place to invest.

You wouldn’t dump ISC funding into premier league football, for example, because it’d be (a) an embarrassingly small amount of money and (b) a waste of that embarrassingly small amount of money because the sport has more than adequate funding from elsewhere.

And yes, I know premier league football is in a different country, I chose it so I could make the point without having to pick a sporting group in Ireland to pointlessly suggest defunding.

They all came in athletics though – one discipline. If we just focused on boxing (for example) and aimed for six gold there – it’d mean that the likes of Annalise Murphy, Cian O’Connor and Rob Heffernan would be overlooked. Is that fair? Should it be really all about the medals?

Plus stars like Bolt receive enormous sponsorship from their global sponsors, which can be reinvested.

It depends what we go to the Olympics for. Do we go to be there or do we go to win? If we go to win then a more niche approach to the sports we enter would seem to yield better results wouldnt it? Fair to all doesn’t or shouldn’t enter it. Should we send over someone who has almost no hope of coming anywhere near the top?

Ok to put it this way, team ireland spent approx 11,000,000 on 60+ olympians and their coaches and we got the results we got. If we cut the Olympian number in half think how much we could do with the investment

@ Scarr,
“Should we send over someone who has almost no hope of coming anywhere near the top”?

Yes we should, because they have qualified by reaching the standard required.
And because experience can be a big contributing factor for future motivation and improvement.

Maybe the standard required could be raised, but then the olympics would soon become a rather dull spectacle with little or no global appeal.

Could you be anymore off topic?

Yawn. Are there aren’t enough other stories to rant on?

give it a bloody rest already, your rant is completely off topic

Wow you are getting more boring comment by comment….

It old you that you wouldn’t remember the pills. It’s either back inside the hospital or accept the depot injections. Also please stop that ridiculous name of Peedoff.

Ya ya ya.

The ISC’s high performance people do continual assessment of athletic performance based on the athlete’s written plans and performances in both training and *all* of their events.

The press does assessment based on whether or not they won a medal at an event that comes round once every four years and is forgotten in the interim.

Which sounds like the better evaluation method to you?

What do you mean by “none of them broke their PB”? Many of them did, and a few who didn’t were injured or sick.
And you’re not rewarding failure. If the athletes don’t meet their performance goals with the ISC, they lose their funding. That’s how its been since the High Performance Unit was set up. They just evaluate them based on *all* of their performance, not just whether or not they medalled in the Olympics the way the press is doing.

Can ya name the athletes or give a link showing the athletes that broke there PBS

You can start by reading this website :)

PB hit qualifying for London (just to make the point that you have to earn your spot on the team, it’s not that your name’s pulled from a hat):
http://www.thescore.ie/deirdre-ryan-olympics-london-2012-profile-high-jump-501869-Jun2012/

PBs hit in London
Day 3: http://www.thescore.ie/live-london-2012-olympics-day-3-537778-Jul2012/
Day 11: http://www.thescore.ie/london-2012-olympic-liveblog-ireland-548556-Aug2012/
Day 15 (3 or 4 PBs here) : http://www.thescore.ie/live-john-joe-nevin-boxing-campbell-554465-Aug2012/

You can start by reading this website :)
As the comments system won’t let you embed http links easily, go to the live blogs for days 3, 11 and 15 on thescore.ie and search for ‘PB’.

Also, Deirdre Ryan hit a PB qualifying for London (just to make the point that you have to earn your spot on the team, it’s not that your name’s pulled from a hat).

You didn’t read the links, did you? There was more than three.
And when you go to a large match like the Olympics, you won’t hit your PB most of the time; the idea is to push your PB past where it has to be to win.
Look at the World Record and Olympic Record for most Olympic sports and you’ll find the former’s higher than the latter for just that reason.
Which is a damn good reason not to use “Did you medal at the Olympics, (Y/N)” as your sole evaluation criteria for an athlete’s funding.