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Compiled by PHILIP REID

O'Callaghan up to the job

RICHARD O’CALLAGHAN won’t win an Ulster or All-Ireland Under-21 football championship medal this year, but you’ve got to admire his commitment to the cause.

A student at St Mary’s College in Belfast, where he is training to be a teacher, O’Callaghan is in the middle of a four-month work placement in southern Spain but still undertook the journey home in midweek to play at centrefield for Fermanagh (right) in their provincial U-21 game with Tyrone. Unfortunately for him, Fermanagh ended up on the wrong end of a 1-14 to 1-3 beating.

Still, O’Callaghan’s commitment – in staying fit and returning home – says a lot about the GAA’s heart beating strongly among its membership.

Elite athletes weigh up the options before flying the flag

IF IT wasn’t so serious, you’d have to laugh. For years, and it still happens, we’ve had to take the digs at us about the “Plastic Paddies” representing the Irish soccer team. Even when the vast majority of players were born and bred in Ireland, the affront – much of it dating back to Jack Charlton’s breakthrough team at the Euro ’88 finals and Italia ’90 – came from sections of the British media who tarred one and all with the same brush.

Funny how things are when put on the other foot, isn’t it?

Funny from this side of the pond, anyway. Maybe it’s just that playing host to the Olympics this year has made them a tad more sensitive, but the reaction of certain sections of the British media to some of their own foreign-born athletes in the World Indoor Championships in Istanbul recently was interesting with the term “Plastic Brits” hurled around without reserve.

The thrust of the finger-pointing was at triple jumper Yamile Aldama – formerly of Cuba, where she was born, and Sudan but now representing Britain – and Tiffany Porter, the hurdler born in the United States to a Nigerian father and English mother. After failing to make the US team for the 2008 Olympics, Porter switched allegiance to Britain, claiming: “I knew I was going to perform no matter what vest I had on. I have always regarded myself as British, American and Nigerian. I’m all three.”

For sure, international sport – especially where money is concerned – means that athletes can be all things to all men and women. The rules are there, be they in athletics or soccer or rugby or cricket, and it’s fair game for national federations to use the rules legitimately to their advantage. Our own FAI have been masters, past and present, at this.

But when is the mark overstepped? Indeed, it was heartening in midweek to hear the concerns expressed by IOC President Jacques Rogge at the end of a two-day executive board meeting where Aldama’s nationality switch was given the green light. At least Aldama’s switch of nationality, a legitimate one under the rules regardless of the fact she has represented Cuba and Sudan in the past, has nothing to do with financial gain.

Rogge doesn’t sound like a man who likes to have the wool pulled over his eyes and is keenly aware that a number of countries – with the finger invariably pointed at the oil-rich Gulf states – haven’t been shy of buying in prospective medallists.

As Rogge put it, “you have the situation of athletes who come from countries where there is a support for them, but then they go to a country because there is a bigger gain to be made. Legally we can not stop it but it does not mean that we love it.”

The problem of elite athletes switching allegiance is not a new one, but – naturally – it assumes greater significance in any Olympic year. Probably the country hardest hit through the years has been Kenya, with the case of Stephen Cherono bandied about most frequently.

He ran for Kenya before switching to Qatar (for a reputed $1 million transfer) and won the steeplechase world championship in 2003 under his new name of Saif Saaeed Shaheen. He was considered a certainty for the gold medal at the 2004 Olympics only for the Kenyan athletic federation to block him competing.

Ironically, in soccer, African countries have been accused of facilitating the switch in allegiance of Brazilian footballers with, at best, tenuous links to their new nationalities.

As far back as 2004, FIFA was forced to tighten its rules – which, back then, allowed players to take up citizenship if they lived in a country for two years – after three Brazilians chose to represent Qatar in the 2006 World Cup qualifying campaign despite having no connections with the country. The requirement has since been increased to five years, which should at least stop the observation once made by Blatter that “half the players” competing in the 2014 World Cup in Brazil could come from Brazil from being a prophetic one.

The higher hurdle put in place, raising the residency rule to five years, should put paid to that.

My favourite allegiance-switching story concerns the five Brazilians who competed for Togo in the 2004 African Nations Cup after it was claimed they had managed to “trace” their roots back to the country. Unlike the GAA in the Seánie Johnston case, there was barely a murmur about household bills or any such like.

Strangely enough, the brouhaha in sections of the British media about the rights and wrongs of foreign-born athletes taking up places on the UK team for London 2012 didn’t apply in the same way when England were poaching cricketers from South Africa. Why weren’t they called Plastic Brits? Perhaps they were.

Still, the rules are the rules and it is up to the rule-makers to ensure fairness rather than money is the prerequisite when applications – be they in athletics, football or tiddlywinks – to switch allegiance come before them.

Festive celebrations fall flat as Roche bows out in record time

NOWADAYS, WE primarily associate sporting occasions on St Patrick’s Day with the AIB All-Ireland club finals and its status as one of the festive focal points indicates the successful marketing acumen of whichever bright spark came up with the idea in the first place.

Over the years there have been a number of great sporting occasions to brighten up many a Paddy’s Day with Michael Dickinson’s feat of saddling the first five finishers in the 1983 Gold Cup at Cheltenham being particularly impressive. Bregawn – with Graham Bradley in the saddle – justified favouritism in leading home stablemates Captain John, Wayward Lad, Silver Buck and Ashley House.

One of the more interesting sporting occasions on this day – March 17th – came back in 1908 in Dublin and involved a world championship boxing bout.

The fight involved the reigning champion, a Canadian who went by the name of Tommy Burns, and Wexford’s own Jem Roche.

Roche, whose other sporting interest was in coaching the Wexford football team, was the Irish heavyweight champion and got the chance to fight Burns who was on a world tour. The noteworthiness of the fight, from Roche’s viewpoint, was for all the wrong reasons. It lasted a mere 88 seconds and went down as the fastest world heavyweight championship bout until George Foreman’s 50-second knockout over Jose Romen in 1973 replaced it in the record books.

Burns was an interesting character. Born Noah Brusso – the 12th of 13 children in Hanover, Ontario – he took to professional boxing after he jumped ship in Detroit. The name change came after a bout in 1904 where he knocked his opponent, Ben O’Grady, into a coma. Pro boxing was illegal and Brusso fled, changing his name first to Ed Burns and later to Tommy.

Although just 5ft 7in, burly Burns began fighting firstly as a light-heavyweight and then as a heavyweight. He became world champion in 1906 when defeating Marvin Hart and, after a number of successful defences, embarked on a world tour that took him to London, Dublin, Paris, Sydney and Melbourne.

He eventually lost his title to the legendary Jack Johnson in a bout that lasted 14 rounds and which was stopped by the police.

‘Accidental guru’ Stockton feeling on top of the world

THE MAN with the golfing Midas touch these days is Davie Stockton (left), who now has the distinction of being putting coach to both world number ones: Rory McIlroy, who tops the men’s rankings, and Korean Yani Tseng who tops the women’s.

Stockton, the 1976 US PGA Championship winner, was always known as a fine putter but stumbled into the role of golfing guru. It all started late in the 2009 season when Phil Mickelson approached him for a couple of putting tips and then went out and won the Tour championship on the PGA Tour. Since then, Stockton has added Matt Kuchar, Adam Scott, Hunter Mahan, Tseng and McIlroy to his stable; has his own golf school on the Californian coast, and has written a book called Unconscious Putting which made the New York Times best-sellers. Not bad for a guy known as the Accidental Guru on the tour!

Ecclestone comes up with winning Formula

FORMULA ONE chief Bernie Ecclestone always seems to be juggling a number of balls in the air at any one time.

This week, the Grand Prix kingmaker was defending his daughter Tamara’s lifestyle after she was ridiculed as a “billionaire bogan” (apparently Aussie slang for someone of lower class!) in an Australian parliamentary debate, while he was also indicating his desire to see the F1 season-opener move to a night-time race to facilitate the huge TV audiences in Europe.

Ecclestone’s handling of the megabucks Grand Prix circuit is apparently recession-proof, and nowhere is this demonstrated as clearly as in the shifting of the guard that takes place on our television screens this weekend where Sky Sports’ marketing of its new dedicated F1 channel gets meat on its bones with actual racing.

The BBC – who previously had exclusive rights in the UK to the F1 races – was forced to conclude its contract two years early due to financial pressures, preferring to keep its full rights to the British Open golf championship and to the Wimbledon tennis championships. Now, the BBC will have a curtailed F1 rights package with Sky getting the full deal.

To rub salt into the Beeb’s wounds, Sky also acquired a number of the BBC’s old commentary team – including Martin Brundle – to head its new venture. Not that acquiring the rights came cheaply for Sky.

They forked out a princely sum of £455 million (€546 million) for the deal that starts with tomorrow’s race in Melbourne and extends until the 2018 season.