Cian O'Conner Wins Gold!

mike65

In Showjumping, 4 faults over two rounds equalls Irelands first GOLD!

Well done lad.

Mike.

eirebhoy

Kian O'Connor won gold in the Equestrian with just a 4 point penalty over two rounds.

BlitzKrieg

Damnit U Beat Me To It!



Ahh Well


We Won Something Woohoo!!! We Won Something!

Gordon

Well done!

mike65

http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?p=1872394#post1872394

Snap

Mike.

Davey Devil

Pity it was horse riding of some sort, is that even a sport? Does the horse get a medal?

eirebhoy

Beat me to it by a couple of seconds too.

When was Ireland's last gold before this?

/edit, first gold in 12 years. :eek:

Raskolnikov

mike65 wrote:

In Showjumping, 4 faults over two rounds equalls Irelands first GOLD!

Well done lad.

Mike.

Damn you're fast! Fantastic result for us, I'm absolutely delighted we're going home with something.

robbie1876

Yay we have a hero! Let's all go to Dublin Airport!

HashSlinging

feck this when is he flying back --->grabs coat and goes on the piss..

Sparks

Huzzah!

Davey Devil

eirebhoy wrote:

Beat me to it by a couple of seconds too.

When was Ireland's last gold before this?

Drugy Smith, but not counting her it was Micheal Carruth in the boxing - now there's a real sport, none of this horsey malark.

Sparks

Now that's a post deserving of a slap to the head...

KevIRL

Horse named Waterford Crystal! Up the Deise! :cool:

Agent Smith

well done!

Amz

Waterford Crystal has been jumping incredibly well during the entire competition.
Congrats to Cian and all involved.

Now... back to the 10,000m

alleepally

Nice one.!

Flukey

Brilliant stuff!

Flukey

Yes. Well anyway, great to see Ireland getting another Gold Medal!

gerire

Its so rare to hear amhran na bhfiann at the olymics it brings over such a good feeling doesn't, Well done laddy

gerire

Nah the horse gets loads of sugar cubes in athens and as much guinness as it wants when it gets back here

Flukey

It is great news. Congratulations to Cian O'Connor. Well done Kevin Babbington and Jessica Kuerten too.

gerire

Davey Devil wrote:

Pity it was horse riding of some sort, is that even a sport? Does the horse get a medal?

Dave did you get lost or something, this is sports, poker is in games >> realworldgames >> poker...

damnyanks

Good to see we won a medal

Sparks

I was impressed that he actually knew the Irish words to it as well Nice finishing touch, that.

Armen Tanzerian

I believe one of the Aer Lingus pilots is favourite for the jet flying later too

Big Ears

great news , hopefully he'll get the complimentary parade down O'Connel street .

Big Ears

Armen Tanzerian wrote:

I believe one of the Aer Lingus pilots is favourite for the jet flying later too

ya the Ryanair one supposedly had a lack of funding .

ERR!

GOOD GRAVY!!we won a medal and a gold one infact huzzah!!!yeay

jank

/edit, first gold in 12 years

eh swimming no in 96 ireland won 3 of them and all clean


well done to him, he didnt bottle it like so many others

Let the arse kissing contest now begin in earnest

(Its what i hate when we do well in something)

daveirl

This post has been deleted.

NeoSlicerZ

omg, we won a gold medal!!
*celebrates*

Sparks

jank wrote:

he didnt bottle it like so many others

"bottle it"???
So jank, how many times have you made it to the olympics then?

jank

yea we all know the surrondings about those 3 gold and one bronze, but remember she was test 2 or 3 times after these races and found nothing

also when she was tested 2 years later the sample was tampered with they found no evidence of drug abuse as per say.

fair enough her euro champs medals were taken away but her olympic medals are to this day "clean" unless you can find evidence otherwise (FINA and the OIC have tried and failed in this case so I would love to know if you have more to add in this case)

As for bottling it well how many athletes have set new national records or personal bests!?

I cant think of one

Dont get me wrong but I dont like cheats in sport but can you honestly say that all the golds won are "untainted"

daveirl

This post has been deleted.

Sparks

jank wrote:

As for bottling it well how many athletes have set new national records or personal bests!?
I cant think of one

So how many personal bests or national records have you set in the Olympics in 30-degree heat and high humidity, without anything near the levels of support their competitors have? James Nolan, for example, got 19k a year. Some of his competitors, like Alan Webb for example, were far more heavily funded (Webb was on $825,000). Now you can't buy a medal - but you can ensure that they have so much other crap to worry about that they don't perform to their full potential. And that's what we did, in effect.

pickarooney

Come on, it's always boiling hot in the Summer Olympics, you don't need a professional coach to point that out to you. No matter what sport you're competing in, you have to do the basic groundwork - acclimatisation to heat, cold, altitude, wind, whatever - if you hope to have a chance at pulling off your best performance. Don't have a government grant? Hitch-hike to somewhere hot and run around in the mountains for a bit. Disingenuous, perhaps, but it all boils down to the individual's commitment in the end, not the financial commitment of the sports association or sponsor.

Sparks

pickarooney wrote:

Come on, it's always boiling hot in the Summer Olympics, you don't need a professional coach to point that out to you.

Nope, but you can go to a holding camp to acclimatise earlier than most of the athletes went. But that takes funding.

No matter what sport you're competing in, you have to do the basic groundwork - acclimatisation to heat, cold, altitude, wind, whatever - if you hope to have a chance at pulling off your best performance. Don't have a government grant? Hitch-hike to somewhere hot and run around in the mountains for a bit.

You are joking, right? You want to hitch-hike up the wicklow mountains and run around with the sheep as training to compete against the best of the world's athletes?

Disingenuous, perhaps, but it all boils down to the individual's commitment in the end, not the financial commitment of the sports association or sponsor.

If there's one thing that you cannot question about this Games it has been the committment of the athletes involved.

ferdi

the horse was bought in germany,the creature that did all the hard work wasnt even irish....still, well done to cian.

pickarooney

Sparks wrote:

You are joking, right? You want to hitch-hike up the wicklow mountains and run around with the sheep as training to compete against the best of the world's athletes?

Wicklow mountains, hot?? Two weeks in Spain would be nearer the mark.

Sparks wrote:

If there's one thing that you cannot question about this Games it has been the committment of the athletes involved.

Can, and will. The committed ones are there giving their all to win, because they have to, this is their life. The others are making up the numbers because they can, this is their hobby.

jank

Doesn't matter. Missing a drug test is the same as failing and being proven to have tampered with a sample is the same as failing

I dont recall her missing a drugs test but your right that with that point.
My point however is that she was never found guilty of taking drugs, bit of a difference but not in the eyes of the rules governing these athlethes (sure look at the rio case!)

So how many personal bests or national records have you set in the Olympics in 30-degree heat and high humidity, without anything near the levels of support their competitors have?

Why are you pushing the question about me, I could be immature and say "what about you?? :rolleyes: "

Im not gifted enough to do what they do and I do respect them but my question still stands, forget about medals for a minute how many of them went in and IMPROVED their times??

I cant think of any, there may be one or two but for the most part the games have been a failure of PERFORMANCE for many of them.

That is my point and dont expect 2008 to be any different!
The IOC must have creamed their pants when the gold was won last night as a lot of powerfull people in this country were getting the knives out for next weeks

"WHAT WENT WRONG IN ATHENS" headlines

And i include the sports minister in that

Anyway at least we still have gold in something

By the way when was the last time ireland left to the olympics empty handed!

PS
Anybody see page 1 in the examiner the completely "forgot" about those 3 golds in atlanta.(the last gold was 92) We might aswell just rewrite the history books while were at it

Amz

I cant think of any, there may be one or two but for the most part the games have been a failure of PERFORMANCE for many of them.

A lot of this could be due to the OCI forcing them to achieve their qualifying standards much earlier in the season, particularly in track and field. Mark Carroll (amongst others) spoke about peaking and how it is rather difficult to peak twice in the one season. The OCI has a lot to consider in that area.

The IOC must have creamed their pants when the gold was won last night as a lot of powerfull people in this country were getting the knives out for next weeks

I'm sure you mean the OCI here, but anyway... The “”hat happened in Athens? Headlines already started. Our sports minister was criticizing our athletes while some were still mid competition as was the president of the OCI Pat Hickey. You just have to look at these boards to see what a "non event" this Olympics was for some people.

Tony O'Reilly of Independent Newspapers is Cian O'Connor's grandfather and one of his sponsors, I'm sure he helped fund Cian's career somewhat and it just shows how a little money can help a persons performance.

PS
Anybody see page 1 in the examiner the completely "forgot" about those 3 golds in Atlanta.(the last gold was 92) We might aswell just rewrite the history books while were at it

We have a tendency in this country to forget the villains (Not really something unique to this country) Michelle Smith De Bruin was always going to be associated with controversy being married to a known drugs cheat. There were always doubts surrounding her rapid change in form/performance, even her physique changed quite a lot before the Atlanta games.

Swimming was my main sport up to last year and at the time whilst we were delighted that it was raising the profile of the sport there was always doubts about the medals and so we never really fully acknowledged them. She let so many people down when she was accused of having tampered with the samples, her attempts to clear her name were feeble and wreaked of guilt.

It's not surprising that the Irish Examiner, amongst others, would choose not to remember her "achievement" when no one is really sure if she achieved it fairly.

Sparks

jank wrote:

Why are you pushing the question about me, I could be immature and say "what about you?? :rolleyes: "

That would be because you're the one who said that the failure was down to the athletes as if the support mechanisms of all of their competitors were somehow totally irrelevant.

Im not gifted enough to do what they do and I do respect them but my question still stands, forget about medals for a minute how many of them went in and IMPROVED their times??
I cant think of any, there may be one or two but for the most part the games have been a failure of PERFORMANCE for many of them.

What a load of cobblers. They were beaten on the day, but that doesn't mean that it's their fault. To have the very best shot at things, you have to have support and coaching in place. We sent out our high jumper without his coach, and at least one of the runners never even had a coach. Our shotgun shooter had to give up his job four years ago and dedicate himself fulltime to training - on a grant that worked out less than the dole, in a sport where equipment and consumables cost a large amount of money (for example, one of his competitors' shotguns would have taken two years for Burnett's grant to pay off). So the athletes find themselves in Athens, already having to deal with the mental pressure of competing in the most widely publicised competition in the world, and now they have all this other crap to deal with as well. No bloody wonder they weren't setting personal bests!!!

The IOC must have creamed their pants when the gold was won last night as a lot of powerfull people in this country were getting the knives out for next weeks

(Assuming you meant the OCI)
Wrong. The knives were out after Sydney despite us winning medals; and after Atlanta as well. And they're out now too. That's one of the problems - there are three groups trying to administer sports in Ireland - the OCI, the ISC and the Department of Arts, Sports and Tourism. It's a serious amount of politics for a small country and it hinders more than it helps.

Flukey

Whatever facilities are needed and are possible we should have. A lot of sportspeople that go abroad to train, avail of facilities that we could potentially have here. Heat training we can't provide, but there are a lot of other things we can. Cian O'Connor's Gold should not be allowed to take any of the pressure off in terms of what needs to be done after these Olympics and our disappointments. With or without last night's win, we need a lot more put into sport in this country.

Amz

What do you propose we do then Flukey?

Any suggestions as to how we could go about doing this?

Flukey

A full review of sport here. We have to look at what the countries that are successful are doing. What facilities are within our capacity to provide? What can we do for our up and coming talents, in order to encourage them and bring out their potential, apart from paying for their airfare? There is a young Irish swimmer who has great potential that has been featured of late. Unfortunately he may have to leave the country to get the help he needs. We need coaches coming in here to coach our athletes or at least coach our coaches how to coach our athletes.

Getting good sports facilities is something that keeps coming up as an issue in several places on these boards. Doing so will have other benefits than helping our current athletes. New people that might be lost to sport might be encouraged to maintain their interest. Good facilities will attract international interest, from which we may get coaches and competitions coming into Ireland. For example, why shouldn't there be facilities here to bring more high-level athletics competitions to Ireland?

Things like that would increase the profile of different sports. We need public and private investment. Our lack of success unfortunately won't attract as much private investment and sponsorship as we might have hoped and needed. It's a catch 22. We need sponsorship for success and we need success for sponsorship. Sport has so many benefits that is it is well worth putting some money into and some proper development. There are a lot of sports that we could compete at. We havn't the success to encourage people at present, so for now we have to work on the potential, which is certainly there.

Sparks

Amz, it's a pretty easy question to answer on a basic level - more money.

Of course, on it's own that's not enough - there are other things that have to be done. But more money, distributed by the Irish Sports Council instead of the Dept. of Sports, with less restrictions on the grants system, would be a monumental first step.

A real committment to supporting minority sports by the OCI and ISC would be an equally large step; for example, there is precisely one regular column in the press covering minority sports - Lindie Naughton's column on thursdays in the Evening Herald. That's it. I mean, it's a great column, but it's not enough because she never has sufficent room to cover everything and it also means that few people get to see the minority sports that are out there. And frankly, not everyone has their buttons pushed by the GAA - I mean, I like to watch the football, sure, but I wouldn't go putting myself into serious debt to play it. Whereas minority sports tend to attract people because they offer a wider set of activities. You might not like football, but what about archery? target shooting? judo? taekwondo? mountain running? canoeing?

But when you watch the money, it's only the big sports that get the majority of the money. And that's a solvable problem.

PS.
Hell, from the target shooting point of view, you could just get the DoJ to not make the sport illegal, like has been done since 1972 to only three weeks ago with target pistol shooting. We missed eight olympic games, with five events or thereabouts in each, that we couldn't even train for because of a policy oversight for crying out loud!

The Rooster

Tom Humphries article on the backpage of the sport section of today's ITimes would fit very well on this thread. Maybe somebody with access to ireland.com could cut and paste it.

Sparks

Olympic failure is part of what we are
Tom Humphries

LockerRoom: Another Olympics and all over bar the blamefest. Even Tony O'Reilly winning a gold medal right there at the end isn't going to be enough to spare us from the mud slinging which has become a ritual part of our quadrennial humiliations.

So let's wade right in. It's not Pat Hickey's fault. It's not John Treacy's fault. It's the fault of our culture. This Olympics saw a few personal bests in bellyaching. Why not? Sure it's part of what we are. Lordee. So much weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth over the Olympic Council of Ireland shifting the closing date for reaching the qualifying standards for Athens. Mark Carroll (in admiration of whom I bow to no man) spoke about a pyramid and there being only one peak in the pyramid and the OCI by shifting the date for qualification forward a little were requiring two peaks, which is impossible.

Well, I don't know. What about two pyramids? The qualifying period for getting the A or B standard for the Games ran from January 1st, 2003, to August 9th, 2004. A modest pyramid peak in the spring or summer or autumn of 2003 would have done just fine. It's not as though the most ballyhooed event in sport comes up on its would-be participants by stealth.

The athletes of more successful nations even manage that elusive double peak in Olympic year. The US Olympic trials took place in mid-July in Sacramento. The Kenyan Olympics trials took place on the 25th and 26th of June. Savage competitions both of them. And all competitors had to have achieved Olympic qualifying standards before they went to compete in their trials. Screw up and you don't go to the Olympics. It's that harsh at the Olympic trials.

In Kenya, Bernard Lagat was the only athlete to qualify again in the same discipline in which he competed in Sydney. Even the Britain team got themselves through wet and windy trials in Manchester this summer.

So, what are we moaning about?

The fact is we're the Champagne Charlies of western Europe. We're a windswept race of Bertie Big Potatoes types. We love the olé, olé, olé stuff. We love waving the flag, worshipping the big screen, making a Mexican wave from Malin to Mizen and generally shouting, "You da man".

Beyond that we don't care much. RTÉ viewers voted Michelle as their best Olympic moment. Voted that our athletes don't get enough taxpayers' money. When the party is on, we'll always vote for another keg. Hey, hey, we're the Irish. In the bare light of morning though when we wake up with our ruddied
cheeks stuck against the smelly cold lino of a Ranelagh bedsit and a steel band playing behind our eyeballs we're not quite so full of good cheer.

We've no plan. And we're sticking to it. We go back to living by the national motto - where's mine?

Honestly. Deep down we don't care.

Drugs for instance. The Sports Council does its best but there's a massive ambivalence out there. In Canada when Ben Johnson happened they had the Dubin Inquiry. They set up a centre for ethics in sport. When Michelle happened, when Cathal Lombard happened, when Geraldine Hendricken happened, we shrugged. Jimmy Magee talked us through it.

Sport in Ireland happens despite ourselves. It happens to a large degree because of the curious organism that is the GAA. It happens because of volunteer effort. Sometimes it's half-arsed. Sometimes it's three-quarter-arsed. Occasionally, despite ourselves, a Sonia O'Sullivan flashes across our firmament, too good to be held earthbound by our failings.

We don't even approach the subject of sport at school level. Physical Education is an A-level subject in Britain. Specific schools in Britain are sports-streamed and most schools there have sports programmes that shame us. Why this should be is something of a mystery to me. We assess language. We assess art. We assess this, that and the other. Sport, we leave be.

Why not a Leaving Cert course in Sports Studies? A course which might require a certain demonstrable level of fitness, the undertaking of certified coaching qualification in a sport, a background in ethics, a little academic understanding of sports and leisure management, of physiology, sports psychology, etc.

So, there's that. There's our ambivalence on the business of taking the smarties. There's our lack of essential seriousness about sport. There's that odd kink in our culture of self-celebration. And then there's the girls.

You know - the girls? The people who make up half, well, slightly more than half, of the population. We don't do enough for them. To Athens we sent 15 women and 35 men. Five of the women were competing in the non-gender-divided horsey events.There's a massive pool of potential there that suffers official and cultural neglect.

Girls are just waiting to be asked. At present women's Gaelic football is well organised and efficiently marketed and it is cleaning up. The area of my own experience is camogie and happy though our existence is, the Gaelic football is starting to make camogie suffer.

If only every sport could evangelise like Gaelic football though. Having two daughters leaves me with a little experience of athletics as well. Said daughters were in an athletics club once. We'd drop them off at the park for training. Pick them up after training.

One winter evening it started raining heavily so we decided to head back to the park early in case the coach wanted to wrap up and get home.

Too late. Found a little huddle of kids alone in the park, wet and crying, darkness falling. Completely abandoned by coach. End of athletics, thanks. They never even got their first taste of steroids.

In America it's a little different and not just with the steroids. They have something called Title IX. A big and clumsy instrument of state, but, hey on a broad basis, it works, it does what it says on the label.

Title IX was introduced back in 1972 and concerns itself with the overall equity of treatment and opportunity in athletics. Schools and colleges have the flexibility to choose sports programmes based on student-body interest, geographic influence, budget restraints, and gender ratio. It doesn't mean you have to have a female quarterback on your gridiron team or exactly the same amount of money is spent per women's and men's basketball player. Title IX means the focus is on the necessity for women and girls to have equal opportunities with men and boys on the whole. Not on an individual,
sport-specific basis but just as a general principle.

Yes, yes, yes. It works. The stats as taken from recent reviews of Title IX are impressive.

• In 2002 there were more than 150,000 women participating in intercollegiate athletics - a four-fold increase since 1971.
  
• In 1995, women made up 37 per cent of college student athletes, compared to 15 per cent in 1972.
  
• In 1996, 2.4 million high-school girls competing as athletes represented 39 per cent of all high-school athletes, compared to only 300,000, or 7.5 per cent, in 1971. An eight-fold increase.
  
• The number of female students participating in high-school sports has risen by 847 per cent.
  
• American women won a record 19 Olympic medals in the 1996 Summer Games. That spread of achievement has continued.
  
• In 1972, 132,299 young girls played high-school basketball. By the mid-1990s that number had increased to 412,576, an increase of over 200 per cent.
  
• The phenomenal and ongoing success of women's soccer in the US is a product of Title IX having opened so many doors.

The benefits keep coming. You challenge girls and they give you back something. Eighty per cent of female managers of Fortune 500 companies in the US have a sports background. High-school girls who participate in team sports are less likely to drop out of school, smoke, drink or become unintentionally pregnant. And down the line the health benefits are huge. Fewer taxpayers' dollars being spent on everything from osteoporosis to breast cancer to heart disease.

What do we do? We tackle our drink culture by keeping kids out of pubs after nine, so we can get down to the serious, melancholydrinking without them seeing us. We brush sponsorships from unworthy sources aside. We're failures but we're pious failures.

For us the Olympics are over now. There will be the splat, splat, splat of mud being slung for a while. There'll be talk of 2016 and all the medals we'll win then. There'll be the odd drugs case and there'll be the occasional loola in a suit who suggests we are worthy people to host the Games.

Mostly though we'll go back to doing what we do best, waiting for the next big party.
© The Irish Times

Thing is, Humphries doesn't do the Sports Council justice. I've worked with them and they're very serious and professional about what they do. The problem is that they're handicapped - they don't get to control the Sports Capital grant, that's held onto for political gain by the Department of Sport (see the recent killarney rowing club debacle); they don't get to go after PE in schools (that's held onto by the Department of Education even though they don't want to do anything with it); and they're heavily underfunded (for example, the total amount spent on the Athens Enhancement Programme over the last two years was 11 million euro - the total spent by the UK on badmington alone in the last year alone was a little over 14 million euro).

PH01

Sparks, and Tom Humphries, have hit the nail on the head on this one.

por

jank wrote:

Dont get me wrong but I dont like cheats in sport but can you honestly say that all the golds won are "untainted"

Sounds to me like you don't like cheats in sport but when the suspicion is on an Irish person you prefer to turn a blind eye.

All sports persons who have failed, missed or tampered with a drug test are cheats in my eyes and what they may have achieved prior to that is tainted.