Marguerite Dockrell’s Olympic career lasted precisely one minute and 31.6 seconds of an Amsterdam afternoon 98 years ago. She finished third in her heat of the 100m freestyle swimming event at the 1928 games, in the process becoming Ireland’s first ever female Olympic swimmer. She was 16 years old.
Her father George swam for Britain in the 1908 games. After Amsterdam, Marguerite studied in France and then in Trinity. She studied dentistry and later worked as a school dental officer in South Oxfordshire, travelling between schools in a Vauxhall 14 towing a caravan fitted out as a mobile surgery.
This piece of Irish sporting arcana is brought to you courtesy of an incredible project put together by the Olympic Federation of Ireland (OFI) which went live this week. Profiles of each of the 1,067 men and women who have represented Ireland at the summer and winter Olympics since 1924 (our debut at the Games as the Irish Free State) are now up on the Olympics.ie website.
So maybe you were selected to go to one Olympics but didn’t make the start line for your event because of a “severe administrative dispute” (John O’Donnell, sprinter, London 1948). Or maybe you were at the other end of the scale and went to six Olympics, four in the summer and two in the winter, the most of any Irish person ever (Terry McHugh, javelin and bobsleigh, all points of the compass between 1988 and 2000). Whoever you are in Ireland’s Olympic history, you’re in here.
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“This has been our longest ever project,” says Heather Boyle, the OFI’s head of communications. “We’ve always had a real belief that for every athlete that goes to an Olympic games, there’s a family, there’s a school, there’s a club, there’s a community – all these people around them who, regardless of the results, are backing them. They backed them before they were ever Olympians, and they backed them when they came home. For us, it’s really important that each one of their identities is recognised.
“Bits and pieces of information for everyone had been around in years gone by, but they have never been put together in one place until now. Before Paris two years ago, we did this thing where we recognised everyone who had ever been an Irish Olympian by giving them a number. It’s a connection between what is actually a tiny number of people who have in common the fact that they made it to the Olympics.”
The project began well over a decade ago when historian Tom Hunt was commissioned to write a history of Ireland at the Olympics. Though the manuscript was ultimately unpublished, it was completed in 2015 and served as a basis for the rest of the project. Since 2016, the OFI website has carried profiles of every athlete who went to Rio, Tokyo and Paris. Other profiles were built by using AI to trawl through publicly available records, including Olympedia, IOC competition databases and World Athletics.
“The OFI used an AI language model to help structure this material,” says Kevin Keane, an OFI staffer who spearheaded the project. “We used it to cross-referencing biographical information from the Hunt manuscript against verified public records for dates of birth, personal bests, clubs, hometowns and competition results. All cross-referencing was limited to trusted sources. Athlete images were sourced from official Games reports and public archives.
“OFI staff then spent several months reading, editing and rewriting each of the 1,067 profiles – checking facts, ensuring consistency of tone and house style, verifying information against original sources, and in many cases conducting additional research where gaps existed. The profiles were then uploaded and coded to allow users to search and filter athletes by Games, sport, hometown and other criteria.”
The result is a living document, a monument to over a century of Irish Olympic history. From John Lavery (artist, born in 1856) to Annabelle Zurby (skier, born in 2008), the whole wild panoply of lives is laid out, connected by the one thing they did that set them apart from almost every other Irish person ever.
Some get longer entries than others, naturally enough. Sonia O’Sullivan’s four Olympics – and all the ups and downs contained therein – are delved more deeply into than that of, say, Bobby Browne, a travelling reserve on the 1948 football team in London. But she and he are still just faces in the crowd. The implication is obvious – whatever you did when you got there, however you performed, you are an Olympian the same as the next one.
“We can say, ‘Once an Olympian, always an Olympian’ and it’s true,” says Boyle. “But we see it as something we can build on and give these people a connection to each other. When we go to an Olympic games, everyone’s result is recorded – it is someone’s greatest achievement. So in years to come, if Jimmy down the road says, ‘I was at the Olympics’, you want it to be there when somebody looks him up.
“But even in a more modern sense, we are finding more and more as our athletes grab the public imagination, they are coming to us to find out more. So when Ellen Walshe wins her gold medals in Paris last month, people are searching for her online and we’re getting a spike in interest.
“Something like this is really needed, because although people talk about minority sports when they mention the Olympics, if you add all the 14, 15 sports together for any one Games, you’re talking about sports with over a million members combined. There’s huge pockets of interest there.”
