The AH Tokyo 2020 Olympics/Paralympics Thread in 2021

Really enjoyed the team gymnastics and delighted for team GB.

It turns out that the twins Jennifer & Jessica were born in Dublin and Alice Kinsella's father played football for Ireland!

Sure we could nearly claim that as an Irish medal if we get stuck🥉

Mark Kinsella was part of the Irish side that played at the 2002 world cup. A very tidy midfielder as well.

There is a swimming stroke and Mona McSharry is in the top eighth in the world at it. Just think about that for a second. Think how many women swim that stroke every single day. And she is the eighth best in the world at it. Mediocrity?

Check out the overall medal hauls of any country our size or population. How much better will they be?

Harsh !

So someone swam faster than anyone else ever has in Ireland at that distance.

You don't think that's something to be proud of and celebrated?

Because I do.

How fast can you swim? Will we be seeing you at the next Olympics?

Those lads would have had to get up at 3am three times a week, be in the swimming pool for 5am. I know one of those lads journey was least a hour every morning. They finish 7am before heading home to bed maybe for hour then get up, go to school, do exams and homework before maybe going into local pool to swim some more. That was just during the week. Thats before they began college where they were on high performance teams in UL or Dublin.

Please share your similar experiences and tell us how great you were.

Eh the point I'm making is that you can break as many Irish records as you want but if you want to compete with the big boys then that's the times you have to beat, not the crap Irish records and that's just a fact.

As a parent who for years got up at 4.30 am to take my daughter to swim training every single .01 of a second off your pb is to be celebrated. Paul O’Connell was a very talented swimmer and is on record as saying that swimming training is the hardest training ever, he found rugby training so easy compared to it.

What Mona has achieved is incredible and she will get better. The drudge of hours doing sets, morning after morning and then going to school/college after is very hard to quantify unless you actually go through it yourself and bear in mind the many hours of land training as well. It’s also a very expensive sport, the skins are outrageously expensive and an average swimmer will go through half a dozen normal Speedo’s a year for training alone due to the chlorine.

Every Irish competitor in the Olympics has sacrificed so much to be there and it’s sad to see their efforts criticised.

I'm not questioning the effort she has put in but the fact is every olympic swimmer has also put in that same amount of work.

What I am critical of is the totally over the top media reaction to athletes who let's face it haven't achieved a medal.

Seen it again tonight with swimmer finishing 14th and Irish media reporting his reaction as ecstatic and over the moon.

That's just embassing.

I just think we would be better off focusing on the sports that we are actually good at on world stage and pumping more money into that like boxing, sailing, rowing etc and have a chance at winning a medal.

At the end of the day it's medal winners that are rembered, nothing else.

Which Irish athletes are currently doing what you describe ?

You can’t understand the effort unless you have seen it yourself, bear in mind the limited financial support here compared to other countries and also the lack of top class facilities. The sports grants top class athletes receive are minuscule for most and if they have a bad year due to injury, loss of form etc their grant is cut. I remember Derval O’Rourke’s grant being cut after a bad year when she had major Achilles surgery.

I’m not trying to be condescending here but you strike me as someone who only gets interested in niche sports every few years and wonders why we underperform as a nation. Truth be told we actually compare favourably to other nations our size.

Our best medal hopes are in the rowing and boxing, maybe the gymnast and equestrian team but however things go I’m just grateful for the distraction from everything Covid related.

We were also dirt poor for most of it which makes a big difference to what training facilities we can provide.

No idea about what facilities are like in for countries our size elsewhere and how they compare. Also if they have focused on only a few sports like we have (in terms of high quality facilities).