An Irishman's Diary

The Liffey Swim has drawn a brave and hardy bunch of bathers to the murky waters of the fabled river every summer since 1920. Tomorrow's contest will attract well over 100 brave souls for separate men's and women's races. At Watling Street Bridge on Usher's Island they plunge into the waters, and from there, man for man and woman for woman, they grit their teeth and front-crawl with the tide, striving to be first to Custom House Quay. Some would say that anyone brave enough to take a dip in the Liffey deserves of a prize of some sort, even if they come last. According to Harry Kavanagh, who organised the swim for many years for the Irish Amateur Swimming Association, the event is a much quieter affair these times than in days past. "It was one the last great free shows in Dublin, attracting huge crowds every August, particularly in the pre-television era."

Indeed, hundreds of spectators can be seen in Jack B. Yeats's 1923 painting of the race. It gives a striking view of the crowds thronging the quayside and O'Connell Bridge, some of them even atop trams, as two competitors swim past.

Bruce Arnold, in his richly detailed biography of Jack Yeats (Yale University Press, 1998, £30), tells us that the painting was noted as a departure for the artist, away from the "Connacht tinkers, ballad singers, wild-looking horses and asses" that featured strongly in his earlier work.

A critic in the Sunday Independent of the time, who was apparently in need of respite from the woes of life, remarked that "the Dickensian touch of exaggeration makes Mr Yeats's pictures exhilarating". The writer continued: "If you had one in your room you would never wish you were dead; you'd look at it and give it another chance."

1924 Olympics

Yeats had a habit of walking about the city taking notes in a sketchpad and, given his interest in sporting subjects, it is no surprise that he was drawn to such a popular event. It is little-known, however, that the great painter won a silver medal at the 1924 Olympics in Paris for the painting.

This is not as strange as it may seem. Competitions for artistic endeavour were held in every Olympic tournament between 1912 and 1948. According to Dr Cyril White, a retired UCD academic who specialises in the cultural and historical aspects of sport, the founding father of the Olympic movement, Pierre de Coubertin, was very anxious to include art competitions from the time of the first modern games in 1896. This was in keeping the original ancient Greek festival, which consisted of contests in athletics, poetry and music at Olympia.

Sporting themes

Artistic entries in the early modern Olympics were required to have a sporting theme, though it is difficult to imagine suitable entries in town planning, another discipline which was featured.

While Dr White acknowledges that "there is a dispute among some Irish sporting and Olympic historians" about the validity of the artistic competitions, he says that "the Olympic Committee clearly stated that all Olympic medals were equal". At 53, having devoted his life to art, Yeats was certainly an unlikely Olympic medal-winner. He was, though, the first to win one of the coveted medals for the newly-established Irish Free State. His medal is being displayed beside the painting for the first time in the Yeats Museum at the National Gallery this week. "We've had the medal in the archive and decided to put it on show around the time of the race," says the museum's curator, Dr Hilary Pyle.

The painter was not alone in his Olympic glory. The poet Oliver St John Gogarty won a bronze medal for poetry at the same 1924 games, which, incidentally, featured in the film Chariots of Fire.

Gogarty, that multi-talented genius who combined a career as a surgeon with his vocation as a poet, had been commissioned by the Free State Government to write an ode to the Tailltean Games.

It began thus:

"Empyrean is the source

Of indomitable will.

God the runner to his course

Holds, and urges on until

Lips and face of blood are drained,

And the fainting limbs are numb."

Chief whip

While Yeats's medal was the first medal for the Free State, the first Irishman to claim an Olympic medal had done so 28 years earlier. John Boland, a Dubliner, won first prize in the singles and doubles tennis competition in 1896. He was, alas, representing Great Britain. Boland later served as the final acting chief whip of the Nationalist Party, says Dr White, his biographer.

The first sportsman to win gold for Ireland was Dr Pat O'Callaghan, who won the hammer-throwing competition in 1928 in Amsterdam and again in 1932 in Los Angeles.

Our final medal-winner in an Olympic art competition was the painter Letitia Hamilton. She took bronze in the 1948 competition in London for a depiction of the Meath Hunt point-to-point horse races.