Tokyo 2020: Hockey team and Jack Woolley show us both sides of the Olympic coin

Rarely does one day in sport encapsulate the extremes of emotion that the Olympic Games did last Saturday in Tokyo.

For the cynics, the Olympics are variously an old boys club, a meal ticket for athletes, won by drug cheats or used by nefarious nations as tools of propaganda to endorse the efficacy of certain ways of life or regimes.

Maybe it is all those things.

But Irish taekwondo fighter Jack Woolley and the women's hockey team, within hours of each other, experienced and expressed another side of how the Games can capriciously give and take.

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In a joyous celebration by a bunch of amateur players, after their win over South Africa the women understood the gift of their talents and the privilege of representing Ireland in an historic match.

Woolley, almost grief stricken, experienced the agony and incomprehension of an unforeseen early defeat after such a long and determined road to get there, a nine-year journey.

“We are delighted to get the win. It is a very special time for us, our first ever game at the Olympics,” said Irish goalscorer Róisín Upton.

“The environment that we had set up over the last couple of days was to enjoy being here and doing things and certainly I knew there would be a lot of emotions and excitement over the first game. The message was to relax and enjoy it and get out there and I think we saw that as a team tonight.”

The hockey team won the first Irish match ever played by a women’s team in an Olympic Games. That will never change. the moment and the mood was a delightful pause in the running narrative of the sport in Ireland.

They were all part of that and they were able to understand its meaning and after the match was won were, for a short time, able to step outside themselves, share the moment with each other and move on.

Woolley had no such affirmation of his immense talent. His defeat by the lower ranked Argentinean Lucas Guzman, who he knew he could beat, was one of those moments in an Olympic Games where the tears were real and the hurt ran deep, where there was no re-run or alternative other than a flight away from the competition he had dedicated his whole career to winning.

The only world he wanted to be part of, at that moment, had told him to leave. Woolley had missed out on Rio by two points and departs Tokyo by two points.

“No one expected me to lose that,” said a disconsolate Woolley afterwards. “Nobody anticipated my performance to be as poor as it was.

“Coming from a small country, for some people just qualifying for an Olympics is good enough. Not for me.”

Although it is ‘only’ sport, competing is about lives that have been put on hold, coaches who have sacrificed as much as athletes, families that have walked every mile in the shoes of their loved ones, taken every blow with them and whose happiness and wellbeing is intertwined.

Woolley’s tearful departure and the Irish women celebrating their making of history; a profound sense of let down and a team etching their own history and cherished memories.

Last Saturday in harsh light, we saw both sides of the same Olympic coin.