Greatest Irish Olympic Stories Never Told

One of Ireland’s first full-time athletes, Terry McHugh was never afraid of taking on impossible odds, and going where no one had gone before

Kerryman Ned Barrett, holder of an All-Ireland winner’s medal for hurling, beat Corkman Con O’Kelly to claim the title of British heavyweight wrestling champion in 1908. The stakes were even higher when the pair clashed again later that year ...

The Corkman once hailed in the US as ‘the Cajun sportsman of the century’ and described by Eamonn Coghlan as ‘one of the greatest Irish athletes of all time’ was also an inventor, engineer and musician. One RTÉ commentator says he was ’probably the most remarkable person I’ve come across in my life’

A snap decision to move to the USA, a doctor with good instincts and a large slice of luck – how the Waterford runner managed to find himself in the 1984 Los Angeles marathon

In Paris in 1924, Yeats’s painting The Liffey Swim took the silver medal in the art competition and gave a country that was just over 18 months old a treasure that has lasted a century