O'Rourke wins Gold

Common Sense

Congratulations, Derval - another new national record of 7.83 and World Champion. Well done also to her coach, Jim Kilty.

rondeco

It was fantastic. Very proud of her.

Dodge

Just seen it on BBC. Great stuff

Pherekydes

Super stuff. Saw it live on Eurosport. Nearly hit the ceiling when she crossed the finish line.

Saw RTE's News at 9:30 last night and it didn't even make top billing in the Sports news.

But at least the Premiership gets extensive coverage, right?:mad:

Fast_Mover

Slow coach wrote:

Saw RTE's News at 9:30 last night and it didn't even make top billing in the Sports news.

ya i noticed that too..couldn't believe it..6 nations rugby was on before it!!:mad:

Well done Derval!!..and to think i can beat her over the first two hurdles..just another 3(indoors)or 8(outdoors) to go...:D
Well done to rest of Irish team too for making it that far..keep up the good work!!

Common Sense

RTE are a disgrace when it comes to athletics. I watched the Rugby match yesterday afternoon - there wasn't even an announcement or ticker line on the screen to inform us of the victory. Woudn't do to tamper with the massive egos that are McGurk, Hook et al.! In fairness, TV3 covered it as their lead sports story on their 5.30 bulletin. Incidentally, for those that haven't yet heard, Cragg ran a very creditable fourth in his final this afternoon.

thirtyfoot

Athletics is a minority sport so unless Sonia O' Sullivan is competing or there is a chance of a medal RTE won't usually cover the event. Maybe if DOR builds on this success and continues to medal, the profile will be raised again and RTE will be covering the championships because DOR is in with a chance of medalling. The European outdoors this year will be a real opportunity as DOR and Cragg will be real medal prospects, I wonder will RTE cover them? AAI should use DOR's success now to promote the sport, she is a very personable, fun person and her event could be perceived as a "cool" event, young kids could relate to it and think they might want to take it up, get Derv onto those kids programmes on saturday morning or the one on RTE2 in the evenings, to a young kid the colour and speed of a 60m hurdles race will appeal a lot more than running around a mucky field of sh*te in the freezing cold and wet.

ChickenTikka

I agree with the comments regarding the pitiful coverage of athletics by RTE.

It seems that athletes get more attention from the national broadcaster when they under-perform than when they do well.

For example, did James Nolan get any credit from RTE for his super performance in the 1500m at the weekend? Yet when he had a poor performance previously, RTE were all over it with their expert pundits - launching personal criticism regarding Nolan's training, commitment etc.

Athletics may be a minority sport - but at the same time, what other sport would get 4000 participants down to a remote village in Co. Cork for a 10 mile run as we had in the recent Ballycotton race. And the event is lucky if it gets a line of ink in any national newspaper. Yet a junior A GAA final in Bally-just-about-anywhere will probably make some news-print even if there were 10 spectators there.

RTE should take a line out of BBC's book. If Derval O'Rourke was British, it would be all over BBC for 3 days - special reports, analysis, interviews with other athletes, interviews with leading coaches etc. Applauding how she did it, with limited resources, did it from Ireland - not from a US base, etc. Applauding her club coaches and national coaches.

But no, RTE and the Irish media sit back, do nothing, wait for failures and then lambast the general state of athletics in the country, and all the money they get ... all €12000 of it which allows our athletes to train full-time professionally and travel to foreign athletics meetings several times a year. No wonder Derval is so thin - no money left for grub!

Fast_Mover

ChickenTikka wrote:

RTE should take a line out of BBC's book. If Derval O'Rourke was British, it would be all over BBC for 3 days - special reports, analysis, interviews with other athletes, interviews with leading coaches etc. Applauding how she did it, with limited resources, did it from Ireland - not from a US base, etc. Applauding her club coaches and national coaches!

ya i totally agree with ChickenTikka on that one!! If it was a British athlete that won we'd never be hearing the end of it!! I dont think she's getting the coverage she deserves..this was no mean feat by any means!!! Athletics in Ireland could really benefit from this win of DOR's!!!

Dodge

Lads Jamie Baulch won loads of world indoor medals and nobody in the BBC gave a fiddlers.

I'm not saying RTE shouldn't have shown it, of course they should but lets not get carried away.

Didn't RTE show Gillcik and Cragg winning gold last year?

thirtyfoot

I think she has got good coverage, nice bit in the Irish Times and Irish Examiner today and it was on the news on saturday too. The BBC had very limited coverage of the Indoors because with all the big shots in Melbourne they had limited chance of medals, same reason RTE wasn't there. At the start of the year it would be difficult for RTE Sport to justify a big spend on the World Indoors to their paymasters when there was virtually no chance of an Irish medal. Now its different, Cragg and O' Rourke are now contenders so RTE will take more interest. Irish athletics gets good coverage compared to other sports, eg, rowing, some could argue they have been much more succesfull than athletics in recent years yet we only see them once every 4 years.

Regarding the 4,000 competitors in Ballycotton, how many of them are in Santry in July supporting the National Seniors or Tullamore for the schools or ferrying kids to parish halls and sports fields in the depths of winter for training? Very few, thats the problem, Masters running is killing Irish athletics.

Common Sense

Yes, but think of the coverage it gives to a sham 'sport' like Formula 1 - no problem sending teams all over the world to follow this. I'm not saying they shouldn't because obviously some people like it, but surely if they cater for followers of Formula 1 (Eddies Jordan & Irvine the only Irish participants in the last 20 years) why didn't they cover an event that a good number of Irish participants with at least 2 realistic medal hopes.

Pherekydes

Tingle wrote:

I think she has got good coverage, nice bit in the Irish Times and Irish Examiner today and it was on the news on saturday too. The BBC had very limited coverage of the Indoors because with all the big shots in Melbourne they had limited chance of medals, same reason RTE wasn't there. At the start of the year it would be difficult for RTE Sport to justify a big spend on the World Indoors to their paymasters when there was virtually no chance of an Irish medal. Now its different, Cragg and O' Rourke are now contenders so RTE will take more interest. Irish athletics gets good coverage compared to other sports, eg, rowing, some could argue they have been much more succesfull than athletics in recent years yet we only see them once every 4 years.

I think she's gotten rubbish coverage. Her mother was just on the radio saying they watched it on Eurosport. This argument that there must be Irish interest just doesn't wash, and the Soccer World Cup will prove it. No Irish team: no Irish interest. No, that won't be the case. This is the World Cup, so it will be covered. And this was the World Indoor Championships in the World's biggest sport, and it got no coverage.

The idea that Masters' Athletics is killing Athletics in this country is rubbish, too. Masters' Athletics is bigger in plenty of continental countries and their Athletics' programmes are thriving.

The media -RTE - playing to the lowest common denominator, and refusing to cover major Athletics' events is inexcusable.

I mean the Outdoor World Championships wasn't even covered last year. But RTE will cover the Europeans this year. Go figure.

Typical parochial outlook...

Dodge

Slow coach wrote:

No, that won't be the case. This is the World Cup, so it will be covered. And this was the World Indoor Championships in the World's biggest sport, and it got no coverage

You're being ridiculous if you thinng the sport of athletics is bigger than the world cup. You being delusional if you think the World Indoors have more interest to the Irish public than the World Cup...

http://www.iaaf.org/WIC06/multimedia/video.html
Full race in the 2nd highlights package at link above

Pherekydes

Dodge wrote:

You're being ridiculous if you thinng the sport of athletics is bigger than the world cup. You being delusional if you think the World Indoors have more interest to the Irish public than the World Cup...

http://www.iaaf.org/WIC06/multimedia/video.html
Full race in the 2nd highlights package at link above

You're being ridiculous if you think I said that "the World Indoors have more interest to the Irish public than the World Cup". The World Cup is not on at the moment, so there doesn't have to be more interest for it to be covered.

You can't compare the sport of athletics to the World Cup, better to compare Athletics to Soccer.

Number of member nations:

IAAF 212
FIFA 207

The Helsinki world championships had TV coverage in 181 countries. Ireland was not one of them!

Dodge

So your only barometer for being

slow coach wrote:

the World's biggest sport

is the number of countries affiliated to the governing body. Not the amount of participants?

The point I'm making is that if you're going to use rubbish like that your argument is already flawed. Why not just argue that it should be on without comparing it to football....

And I'll add, again, that I think it should've been on tv

warren t.

Firstly well done to Derval.

Secondly, I am sick and tired of people constantly banging on about lack of coverage of athletics. People should wake up and smell the coffee. ATHLETICS IS A MINORITY SPORT IN IRELAND. Why will people just not accept that we dont deserve to have RTE send a camera crew to every race involving an Irish person. The truth hurts. We dont deserve national coverage on an ongoing basis.

Its the easy option each time to turn around and blame RTE. Letters will appear in the IRish Runner banging on about it again but we are a small family who seems to think that we are bigger than the Premiership family in this country. I am by no means sticking up for RTE but RTE is a business and like all businesses its about bums on seats. OK, they are a semi state body funded by the tax payer but how can they justify to the vast majority of tax payers who never heard of Derval O Rourke until last Saturday, spending money covering the world indoors?

We have to take a look at ourselves first and market ourselves properly, not expect RTE to do it for us. As long as whingers continue to bemoan the fact that RTE dont go racing to cover all athletics events, we will miss the big picture which is that athletics has little or no support outside of the hardcore few like me and others on this site who go around the country to races.

For example, take a look at the recent national cross country in Santry. It was pitiful. Clubs didnt even turn up for Gods sake. If RTE had their DG there that day, how could you convince him that this was worth covering? I was embarrassed by the small pithy few who turned up. Take away coaches and family members and how many real spectators were there on the day?

Yes, RTE and other media outlets do cover the Premiership wall to wall. But the Premiership is covered exactly the same in hundreds of countrys world wide, not just here. Whatsmore, go to Dublin airport any Saturday morning and watch the hundreds if not thousands of Irish people heading off to watch matches in the Premiership. Look at the ten thousand Irish gone to Cheltenham this week. There will be over forty thousand in Croke Park for the club finals on Friday. Four small clubs attracting forty thousand people. The GAA has 800,000 members, there are about 400,000 people playing soccer in Ireland and next year there will be 80,000 people going to watch soccer, GAA and rugby matches in Croke Park. Should RTE ignore this and send cameras to Santry instead for the national track and fields which are usually held the same day as a big GAA match in Croker? If we got one hundredth of that at Santry (800 people) we would be dancing jigs. How many Irish went to Moscow. Ten? Twelve?

Dont think RTE would not have covered the world indoors if they could justify it audience wise. If they knew that they could get 300,000 viewers, they would have sold ads around it. Thats the way they make money. They are duty bound to the licence payer to spend our money wisely, not just keep disgruntled athletics fans happy. How many other sports have the same gripe. If RTE were to keep them all happy, there would be nothing but sport on all day. Think of the uproar then considering that sport, let alone athletics, is not everyones cup of tea.

By the way, isnt there a new national sports station, Setanta. Why did they not cover the event. Why do they concentrate on rallying and Italian soccer. They are a private business which needs to make money. If athletics was so popular (according to posters on this page), why did they not jump at the chance to win a few more viewers? Because they know that there is more interest in Italian soccer in this country than there is in athletics. It pains me to say it but that is the fact. Maybe now with Derval winning and a bit more success from other athletes, we might get a bit more coverage. But its not up to the media to do it for us. We must push ourselves and we could start by asking why so many clubs didnt bother sending teams to our national cross country cships.

RTE send a comm team to Holland for the European Cross Country. Ireland did poorly. Was it money well spent? Did people come on here praising RTE for sending a comm team to cover it?

Anyway, RTE radio had Greg Allen there. THats where I heard race. She was interviewed afterwards and last night I heard Hackett and Kielty on Sportscall ahead of rugby and GAA. Funnily, there were no other calls about Derval. Maybe they didnt let anyone else on. Or more likely, nobody else was bothered enough to ring in about it. I was in Limerick to watch Treacy and I have watched SOnia and Catriona all over Europe. When they were going well, there were crowds and when there were crowds, there were media. Thats the cycle, not the other way around. Lets build on Dervals win and look at ourselves for publicity, not RTE or TV3 or SKY. We lead, they will follow. Thats the way the media works.

thirtyfoot

Brillantly put, and you are passionate about the sport. The AAI should use DOR's success to promote the sport, she is a good commodity, very marketable, a bit of a charachter. The sports guys on Newstalk106 here in Dublin thinks she is the business, they interviewed her on saturday after the race (and during the week in the runup to the race) and when asked what she would be doing next, she said she'd be having a few glasses of wine and celebrating for the week! That kind of attitute is a breath of fresh air and people can relate to it, Derval's media persona is natural. She even got a mention on the munster rugby fans website, the boys there reckon munster rugby should sign her up, they need a bit of pace in the backs!

Snickers Man

First off: Many congratulations to Derval O'Rourke. It's a fantastic achievement. One that not even the goddess Sonia herself (and I'm being genuine) managed to achieve.

So why the comparative apathy?

Could it be that the last bright-eyed freckle-faced strawberry blonde to bring us back a gold medal turned out to be a drug cheat, a fact of which we had been warned in advance but refused to accept?

Could it be that those, and there were many, who insisted she be given the benefit of the doubt felt utterly betrayed when it was proved beyond all reasonable doubt, no matter what her obfuscating lawyer said, that she had deliberately messed up her urine sample, and that as a result they don't want to be fooled again?

Could it be that athletics in general, and the explosive events like sprints in particular, has deservedly earned the reputation of being a dirty sport at the highest level with so many of its heroes--from Jonson to Christie to Flo Jo to Lewis--implicated in dope cheating? And that's without mentioning the Russian shot putters.

Could it be that we even had to dope a horse to get a medal in the last Olympics?

None of this is any criticism of Derval O'Rourke. There is not a shred of evidence, other than the fact that she won, that she has received any sort of illegal assistance, chemical or otherwise, at all.

Rather, it is a mitigation of the crimes of apathy of for which the population at large is being accused. Too many cheats have won too many medals for too little sanction.

This should be an occasion for great rejoicing. And it is probably a fully deserved one. This really could be a wonderful tale of a young girl with a load of talent and determination working hard and getting her just rewards.

Normally that would be an excuse for a major celebration. Sadly it isn't with athletics, because people don't trust the sport any more. That's not Derval O'Rourke's fault.It's the fault of all those who took the short cut of taking drugs to enhance training or even to try and put in what God left out; and it's the fault of those who let them get away with it.

I'd shoot them before I'd shoot RTE.

Pherekydes

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According to the most recent (2004) Annual report, RTE's Advertising income was €144m, and its licence fee income was €166m.

Of course, licence fee payers are a captive audience, so to speak.

Our nearest neighbour, the Beeb, has as many, if not more, things on its plate to cover, without the help of advertising revenue, including Cricket, Rugby League, Darts and Snooker, yet they still manage to cover Athletics reasonably well.

We are not asking , or expecting, live coverage for every meet involving Irish participation. But the World Championships might be nice. And such coverage is not just for aficionados. The general public will watch. If they can justify showing the National Championships, indoors and out, then surely they can justify showing the biggest Athletics meet?

Or how can they justify showing the Europeans, which they undoubtedly will, but not show the World's?

Is Irish interest the only criterion, but only for Athletics?

P.S. They don't have to send cameras. It's mostly done by host broadcaster feed.

subfour

Snickers Man wrote:

None of this is any criticism of Derval O'Rourke. There is not a shred of evidence, <b>other than the fact that she won</b>, that she has received any sort of illegal assistance, chemical or otherwise, at all.

Please elaborate. How is this evidence that she is doping? Surely it is the opposite, since she has passed drug tests since the race?

Common Sense

I think in fairness to Snickers Man that what he said was clumsy writing rather than suggesting she is on drugs. I can't understand why drugs or comparisons with Michelle De Bruin were brought into this conversation at all. Really what the discussion was about was (a) why it didn't get more coverage and (b) whose fault is that. A lot of very good points were made in the discussion and I agree with those who say that the primary responsibility for getting 'publicity' for our sport lies with the AAI, which at present is undergoing a structural change. Hopefully this is one of the first issues that the new 'professional' set-up will tackle.

Akelduff

Slow coach wrote:

Super stuff. Saw it live on Eurosport. Nearly hit the ceiling when she crossed the finish line.

Saw RTE's News at 9:30 last night and it didn't even make top billing in the Sports news.

But at least the Premiership gets extensive coverage, right?:mad:

On radio, INN - who supply the country's independent stations - led with it from the off, knocking the rugby down to second.

Akelduff

Slow coach wrote:

According to the most recent (2004) Annual report, RTE's Advertising income was €144m, and its licence fee income was €166m.

Of course, licence fee payers are a captive audience, so to speak.

Our nearest neighbour, the Beeb, has as many, if not more, things on its plate to cover, without the help of advertising revenue, including Cricket, Rugby League, Darts and Snooker, yet they still manage to cover Athletics reasonably well.

We are not asking , or expecting, live coverage for every meet involving Irish participation. But the World Championships might be nice. And such coverage is not just for aficionados. The general public will watch. If they can justify showing the National Championships, indoors and out, then surely they can justify showing the biggest Athletics meet?

Or how can they justify showing the Europeans, which they undoubtedly will, but not show the World's?

Is Irish interest the only criterion, but only for Athletics?

P.S. They don't have to send cameras. It's mostly done by host broadcaster feed.

I think it's probably skimping on money for rights.

You'll notice RTE haven't done the Worlds live since 1997, and have shown highlights only once since then.

The 2002 World Cross-Country Championships from Leopardstown ar ethe only Worlds they've shown since Sports Stadium was axed - probably earlier.

What they have shown recently are European Championships - indoor, outdoor and cross-country - so they obviously have some issue with the IAAF.

Yet, having watched a lot of Dutch TV lately, if there's someone Dutch competing in any major event anywhere in the world, there <B>will</B> be live coverage, and what's more, there will be special reports and interviews on their nightly sports highlights programme, which at wekeends is on at the attractive time at 8pm.

Alos, take a look up north - BBC Northern Ireland have four represntatives at the Commonwealth Games in Melbourne... that's what youn call providing coverage