HANDBALL: The worst most teams have to worry about before a major championship is having plans disrupted by last-minute injury.
For Mauritania's Olympians, the problems have been more serious. As the athletes prepared to fly out of Nouakchott two weeks ago, the west African republic was rocked by a coup d'etat.
Coups are not unusual in Mauritania, and the country's President - who seized power in one two decades ago - has since rallied. But the collateral damage extended as far as Drumshanbo, Co Leitrim, where years of preparation to be Mauritania's host town went up in smoke.
The first athletes didn't arrive in Ireland until the weekend, heading straight for Dublin and the start of competition. And it was only yesterday that the Africans could field a full side in the sole event they've entered: the seven-a-side team handball.
The players were reluctant to discuss what their liaison officer called the "confused" situation back home. But they have quickly become crowd favourites, not least because of their shortage of resources. Although decked out in an attractive all-yellow strip, some of the late arrivals yesterday (they checked into their hotel only two hours before the game) had to play in what looked like army boots.
The team also appears to be one of the youngest at the Games. Thanks to Mauritanian patronymics, most of the players' names have the prefix "Oul" or "Ould", as in star striker Mohamedmahoud Ould Bouh. But this could not be more ill-suited to the cherubic handballers. Heavy boots and all, one of the late-comers, Brahim Oulsidi, scampered around the pitch like an irrepressible 10-year-old. In fact, it emerged from inquiries, he's 11.
The west Africans managed to beat Palestine with only five players on Sunday. Sadly, even at full-strength yesterday, they were not quite good enough for a bigger, stronger, and fully-sneakered Egypt, going down 8-6 in an exciting match. The Mauritanian delegation was shopping for footwear yesterday, and could be formidable opponents next time out.
The brand of handball being played at the National Show Centre in Cloghran should not be confused with the GAA version, and the game once played in three-sided alleys the length and breadth of Ireland.
It's much more like basketball, except played with a ball you can grip in one hand, and with small, soccer-type goals and large, soccer-type goalkeepers. Originally an 11-a-side game staged on full-sized football pitches, it became popular in the Nordic countries, where snow drove it indoors and into its reduced Olympic format. Indeed, speaking of Nordic countries, the other popular cause at Cloghran yesterday was Iceland. Trailing 11-4 and in danger of being overwhelmed by a powerful US team, the Scandinavians rallied thrillingly to be only two goals down with a few minutes left.
An equal-opportunity employer, the Icelandic team featured two women in an otherwise all-male clash: named in the vernacular style Gudmunsdottir and Reynisdottir. But it was one of the team's sons, Andri Tonsson, who did the damage with some brilliant finishing. The comeback faltered, however. Alarm bells ringing, the Americans sprung their powerful goalkeeper Chris Martin into attack, and promptly killed off the game with a couple of late strikes.
Incidentally, despite its enormous size - 12 times that of Ireland - Mauritania has barely half Ireland's population. Its economy is also enormously poorer than ours, a fact indirectly underlined three years ago by the commissioning of the Irish-owned Atlantic Dawn, the world's largest fishing vessel. Too big for EU waters, the ship was instead dispatched to African seas where it went to work, under licence, off the Mauritanian coast.
That and the Special Olympics aside, there are few connections between here and there, although the Taoiseach built some bridges this week. Mr Ahern met Mauritanian team members at the RDS on Monday and posed with them for photographs, something that "knocked them out", said team liaison George Kiely.
"They phoned home last night to tell their families." So the Taoiseach can console himself that he's big in Mauritania. If the booing at Croke Park gets worse, or his back-benchers attempt a coup, at least he has somewhere to fly into exile.
