The money trail is becoming more transparent

ATHLETICS: The issuing and distribution of grants - or the carding scheme, as the Sports Council prefers to call it - has always been a sort of work in progress

ALL THE years in and around this sport have taught me the three things athletes are most obsessed about are medals, drugs and money. Not necessarily in that order. No athlete will deny that winning medals is what the sport is all about. No athlete will deny, either, that drugs are still a bit of a problem – although if they get caught then they will deny that, too.

On the contrary, no athlete will ever admit they go into the sport for the money. Sure, there’s very little money in athletics anymore, anyway. Unless you’re Usain Bolt, that is.

But you should hear how most athletes react when they’re told their grant is cut. What? No more money? In some ways, money has become an unhealthy obsession, as it has in most sports. But it’s not so much that athletes are in it for the money. They just don’t want to be left out of the money – particularly when it comes to the grants.

On Wednesday, the Irish Sports Council (ISC) announced that €2.65 million of taxpayers’ money is to be divided among 273 athletes, and four teams, from 21 sports. As Abe Lincoln said, you can’t please all of the people all the time, but I reckon most of these athletes are delighted with what they got.

Particularly given the overall amount is slightly up on last year. There is certainly no recession in athletics, as the overall amount the runners and jumpers got, €468,000, is well up on the €396,000 announced last year.

More importantly, the method and criteria for issuing grants would appear to be fairer and more accountable than previous years.

In fairness, the issuing and distribution of grants – or the carding scheme, as the Sports Council prefers to call it – has always been a sort of work in progress. Five years ago, they got it disastrously wrong, cutting, without warning, several established athletes such as Sonia O’Sullivan, Mark Carroll, Karen Shinkins, Peter Coghlan, James Nolan, Paul Brizzel and Gary Ryan. That was greeted with the angry shock of an amputation, not the silent resignation of a main character shunted off the stage and into retirement.

“Maybe instead of firing us, we should fire them,” said Carroll at the time, referring to the men in charge of the Sports Council. “What myself and others use the grants for is to fund the things we don’t have in Ireland, the facilities we’ve never been able to get, the warm-weather training, the indoor arena.”

Nolan, who was still only 28, was even more damning: “In a normal job that would obviously be unfair dismissal,” he said – having been told his grant was cut just hours before departing to South Africa for training. Olympic rower Gearóid Towey, who had his grant of €30,500 cut to zero, said it felt like “a big kick in the teeth”.

Of course it wasn’t always this way. In Johnny Watterson’s History of Ireland’s Olympians (with Lindie Naughton) there are astonishing accounts of athletes having to fund-raise their way to Melbourne, Tokyo or Mexico, and then take unpaid leave from work to compete.

The Melbourne Olympics are a prime example. The Olympic Council of Ireland (OCI) was flat broke at the time, and Ronnie Delany, who became the headline act with his gold-medal run in the 1,500 metres, was a borderline selection, mainly on financial grounds. High-jumper Brendan O’Reilly wasn’t so lucky. He was originally selected, had his bags packed at his college in Ann Arbor, Michigan, only to receive a two-word telegram: “Trip Cancelled”. That was solely on financial grounds. In the end, Ireland sent a team of just seven boxers, three athletes, one yachtsman and a wrestler. Between them they won five medals – which must rank as the greatest return on any Olympic investment.

Gradually, the money crept into the sport, initially as prize money – and then as appearance money. The old International Amateur Athletics Federation (IAAF), founded in 1912, held out as long as they could, but eventually, at their congress in Athens in 1982, altered their charter to allow athletes to receive “compensation” for participation in international competition. Some athletes were already being handsomely compensated. That opened the floodgates, and these days, the IAAF refers to the International Association of Athletics Federations – because there is nothing amateur about the sport anymore.

With some athletes getting paid, there was soon the need for other athletes to be funded, which is where the taxpayer came in. Initially, government funding for Irish sport was a little haphazard. Cospoir, the first government sporting body, founded in 1978, used to distribute grants almost at random, and, for a while, the OCI played a role in dishing out the money. At one point, in 1988, the old governing body of athletics, BLÉ, actually demanded a percentage of the athletes’ earnings, instead of the other way round, which briefly threatened the participation of the likes of John Treacy, Eamonn Coghlan and Marcus O’Sullivan at the Seoul Olympics.

It wasn’t until the ISC became the statutory body for sport in 1999 that the distribution of grants was made more rigorous, and indeed accountable – and the amazing coincidence is that Treacy and Coghlan are now running the show. Given their background, and experience, they probably know more than anybody else about the role money plays in attaining success.

Coghlan is a new face in the Sports Council, having been made chairman of the high-performance committee in November, and he knows what he’s talking about.

“Of course money is a key ingredient in the support system,” he told me. “But it’s not the only ingredient. The science back-up and other support needs to be there too. But as a former athlete, I look at this and say, ‘My God, these athletes really have an incredible support mechanism behind them’. The top athletes, getting €20,000, or even €40,000, is a fantastic relief for them, instead of them having to beg a shoe company for a quid, or begging your way into a race for a few quid.

“My only fear was that athletes would put the cart before the horse, try to run the times or achieve the criteria just to get the money. But to address that, they’re now being monitored on a quarterly basis. They’ve got to deliver on what they’ve clearly identified on their application form. We’re not just putting €20,000 into their pockets anymore. If they’re not reaching their targets, we’ll want to know why, or what we can do about it.”

The big difference is that just because €468,000 is earmarked for the athletes doesn’t mean they’re going to get it all. They have to prove they’re worthy of it. The best way to do that is to win medals – which is all they should be obsessed about anyway.