Irish medal hopes in Rio just got brighter

SIDELINE CUT: We have a better chance of a medal now than we would have done had the skateboarders of the world been welcomed into the Olympic family

IN THEIR royal way, the doyens of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) have doubled Ireland’s chances of making an appearance on some medal table. As expected, golf and sevens (rugby union, as opposed to the Kilmacud version) were yesterday voted into the golden circle of Olympic sports, disciplines in which the Irish can boast some of the best practitioners. These sports will make their appearance (although not their debut, as rugby was booted off the roster back in 1925, and golf was played in 1904) in Rio in 2016.

Broadly speaking, this is a welcome development. As was noted in the citations yesterday, rugby sevens is a fast and lively sport, it is full of scoring, it is a crowd pleaser, the games are happily concise at just 15 minutes a half and, most crucially of all, it is easy to understand what the hell is going on.

Golf was probably inevitable. It seems a shame they did not induct golf to correspond with the hey-day of John Daly but, if nothing else, including the sport guarantees the IOC members plenty of good courses in the host cities from now and forever.

It was timidly noted, for instance, that Rio, being incredibly densely structured and stuck for green areas, has but two golf courses to serve its population of six million (not all of whom golf everyday).

We can guess what might happen between now and 2016. A map will be placed on a table. With a few neatly drawn pencil lines, an inestimable number of citizens will be moved from one of the teeming favelas in the north of the city, perhaps being invited to double up with the inhabitants in another, and a landscape straight out of the beloved Augusta, Georgia, will be created from the barren waste land, immaculate and beautiful. Build it and they will come.

Tiger Woods assured the IOC delegates of that in a film he sent in a bid to help them to make up their minds. The Chosen One might be over-estimating his cachet in this instance.

An extraordinary number of people seem to want to be like Tiger, but if the IOC were unmoved by getting to breathe the same air in the same room as Barack Obama last week, they are unlikely to be overly impressed by a priority-post DVD sent by Tiger.

If golf has anyone to thank for getting bumped up from the list of ordinary sports, then it is our own Pádraig Harrington. The laid-back Irishman apparently told the delegation: “As a child, I have always dreamed of becoming an Olympian.”

Even the most sated and cynical IOC man could not but have been charmed by Pádraig’s sincere delivery and the broad smile. His presence was surely a clincher.

But the process highlights the arbitrary nature of the IOC. Sports come and make their bid and are treated to a thumbs up or a thumbs down. Karate, for instance, a sport with granite credentials and tens of thousands of hardcore devotees, remains out in the cold.

For all we know, the greatest Olympian of all time is right now in his back garden taking his anger out on the spare tiles he keeps in his shed, destined to remain an obscure and frustrated sporting genius for the remainder of his days.

And spare a thought for “roller sports”, which presumably includes skateboarding and go-karting. Ditching these fashionable subterranean activities in favour of something as staid and pro-establishment as golf was a fairly firm rejection of youth culture by the IOC.

At the winter Games, snowboarding has become the most hip of all the disciplines, with its courses mastered by counter-cultural nerdish kids from the Rocky mountains and such places. These Olympic champions are frighteningly confident kids who speak like Jeffrey “the Dude” Lebowski while plotting their way towards eventually running a Fortune 500 company. These teenagers make the straightforward downhill skiers seem like quaint relics of Ye Olde World sport in comparison.

One can only imagine that their asphalt boarders would have injected the summer Games with a similar brand of privileged street culture, but the IOC knocked that on its head, and in board parks across the western world skaters are doubtlessly responding to the rebuff by getting very, very high.

But their day will probably come. With the Olympics, everyone’s day comes sooner or later. The great, unfair advantage the IOC have over the rest of humanity is that they plot and scheme in terms of what is going to happen six years ahead. These people make reservations in hotels that will not be built for another four years.

They can send in requests for comfort pillows that they will require in 2016 and remind hotel chefs who have yet to be appointed that they like basil in their scrambled eggs. They are extraordinarily, frighteningly well-organised people. To most people in the world – even to the perpetually dancing citizens of the Marvellous City – the Rio Olympics remains a distant and abstract thought. Even for potential Olympians, it is at best a vague and distant date on the horizon, a place that they may reach if they progress through the hundreds of immediate goals that they set themselves every week between now and then.

Nonetheless, this announcement changes things for a lot of sports people. It is probably true that neither Rory McIlroy nor Keith Earls had ever thought about becoming Olympic medal winners before now. The ladies and gentlemen of the IOC have made that possible, providing, of course, that the vagaries of injury, form and age do not betray them during the intervening years. Golf is one of the few sports that can grant its elite practitioners longevity, but we can only guess as to how Harrington’s game will look in six years. One thing is sure: we have a better chance of a medal now than we would have done had the skateboarders of the world been welcomed into the Olympic family.

So Ireland just may be in the medals for Rio 2016. Of course, the way this country is going, most of us are going to be bussing tables there by then anyhow.