It was when RTÉ announced their nominees last week for their 2025 sports awards that, lest we’d forgotten, it couldn’t but dawn on you that we’re really rather good at this sports lark. Rory McIlroy, Kate O’Connor, David Clifford, Katie McCabe, Troy Parrott, Sarah Healy, Ben Healy, Katie-George Dunlevy ... ah here.
It was also a reminder, as Sonia O’Sullivan noted on Sunday, that a year in sport is an exceedingly long time. It was in the dim and distant past of March, after all, that we lost the medal-winning run of ourselves at the European Indoor Championships when, in the space of 36 minutes, Mark English, Healy and O’Connor all collected gongs.
That, really, should have sufficed on the athletics front for 2025, you don’t want to be greedy. But even before RTÉ took to the air on Sunday, 16-year-old Emma Hickey had taken bronze at the European Cross-Country Championships when she was surrounded by auld wans in the women’s under-20 race.
And then Nick Griggs ambled through the winning tape in the men’s under-23 race, like he’d just had a brief trot to catch a bus. As Greg Allen noted: “It brings to a total of 24 medals won by Irish athletes in 2025 – and that’s a record number!”
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Twenty-four! We’ve been coming down in medals. And that wasn’t even the end of it. A bit after, we struck again with Ireland’s first senior men’s medal at the championships in an entire quarter of a century.
One small bone to pick, though. It was a queasy experience for those viewing from the couch. Admittedly, not as rough an ordeal as the actual runners endured, but still. The course? The extreme windiness of it gave it the look of a go-kart race you might have taken on back in the day. And when the cameras took to the air to speedily pursue the competitors, you were left close enough to losing your brunch.
It was narrow too. Our Cian McPhillips is a big man, so when he tried to navigate the course in the mixed relay, our host Paul O’Flynn suggested that he was “like a loose horse in the grand national”.
Griggs had no such trouble. “This is like a run in the park on a sunny day,” said Greg as he strolled his way towards gold. “I think he could have gone for another lap or two,” David Matthews agreed. By the end of it all, Griggs had not one but two golds draped around his neck, the team having been victorious too. Some day.
“I was the nearly man of these champs,” said a tearful Griggs in his post-race chat, an exultant Rob Heffernan acknowledging that past misery. “He’s had a lot of heartache when he’s gone in to the race as favourite.” But now? “The sky’s the limit for this guy, he has it all.”
All you can hope is that the fella can chill out over Christmas.
Alas, Kayla Madden’s point four minutes and 17 seconds into added-time in the club camogie final has denied Athenry and St Finbarr’s that pleasure.
“They have to go to a replay on the first weekend in January,” as Ger Canning told us while the Athenry players celebrated coming back from the dead with that equaliser, having been just the six points down with five minutes to go.
Ger was, possibly, rueing the otherworldly cool of Madden in that moment, all of which meant that he’ll have to be back in Croke Park too having barely digested his plum pudding.
Player of the match Therese Donohue had no complaints. A whole 12 years since she retired from intercounty camogie, at which point you might have thought she’d start looking forward to Christmases, the 44-year-old saluted her Athenry comrades for giving her another big day out.
Truly, these sports folk are a different breed.
Ursula Jacob, on the RTÉ panel, described “Christmas” as a distraction ahead of the replay, when for regular folk it’s a welcome diversion from the grind.
“You’ll have tired bodies, tired legs, you’ll have ...”
“Turkey?” A fair question from Ann Marie Hayes. But Ursula looked at her like she’d never heard of the thing. Ice baths, 10-mile runs, press-ups, squats, weightlifting ... there’s a reason why these people play in All-Ireland finals and the rest of us just watch on telly.
