Making up for Baron ideology

The Irish Times/Mitsubishi Electric Sportswoman of the Year Awards launch: Mary Hannigan explains the philosophy behind a new monthly accolade with women only in mind.

"In France, Germany, Italy and even England, many girls are devoting themselves to public sports which demand violent exertion and sometimes, it would seem, a notable scantiness of clothing." "Their performances are done before crowds of male spectators . . . they are irreconcilable with women's reserve . . . furthermore, the extreme exertion that is required by such sports as track racing, weight throwing and competitive rowing must be bad for even the most robust of women."

What bastion of conservatism came out with that spiel? Well, how do we put this? The Irish Times.

The only mitigating circumstances we can offer are that the extract came from a 76-year-old editorial, one supporting Pope Pius XI's opposition to women exerting themselves, in a violent kind of way, on the sporting field, and that folk from that era still half-reckoned the earth was flat.

Incidentally, 1928 was also the year of the Amsterdam Olympic Games (the year Johnny "Tarzan" Weissmuller triumphed in the pool), one that was missed, because of ill-health, by the founder of the modern Olympics, Baron Pierre de Coubertin.

It's probably just as well he wasn't there, it being the first time women competed in Olympic track-and-field events.

"Women have but one task, that of crowning the winner with garlands," he had, after all, once famously said.

In 1928, in Amsterdam, these same women had shown signs of the violent sporting exertions to come - de Coubertin, recuperating at home, never fully recovered from it all.

Quite what the author of the above editorial, not to mention Pius XI or de Coubertin, would have made of Michelle Aspell (basketball), Cora Staunton (Gaelic football), Eimear McDonnell (camogie), Olivia O'Toole (soccer), Suzanne O'Brien (golf), Jenny Burke (hockey), Claire Curran (tennis) and athletes Sonia O'Sullivan, Gillian O'Sullivan and Catherina McKiernan, to name but a few, we dread to speculate.

We'd like to believe they'd have been impressed, perhaps sufficiently to applaud the extreme exertion and seemingly effortless brilliance with which those women compete, but we suspect they'd have regarded the manifestation by women of such sporting passion, guts and skills as the end of civilisation.

Some of these women have received recognition for their abilities - last year McDonnell, for example, was the first camogie player to receive a Texaco award in 17 years, while the achievements of McKiernan and the O'Sullivans have been widely acknowledged - but many are largely overlooked, often because their sports fall into that much-loathed category of "minority", one that usually features only in the sports-round-up sections.

The Irish Times, then, in association with Mitsubishi Electric, has decided to try to redress that imbalance, even to the smallest degree, by launching a monthly award to acknowledge and celebrate the achievements and performances of the country's finest sportswomen.

Ideally, of course, there would be no need for distinct "sports people" and "sports women" awards, but until Suzanne O'Brien receives the same acclaim as Padraig Harrington for her golfing achievements many of the accomplishments of our most gifted sportswomen will be swamped by the coverage afforded their male counterparts, coverage that is chiefly determined by the demands of the readers and the size of the attendances at their events.

If Damien Duff excels for Chelsea in the Champions League and for Ireland in the World Cup qualifiers there's probably not much chance of Olivia O'Toole or any of her Irish team-mates beating him to a monthly or annual football award, however brilliantly they perform.

And if Henry Shefflin continues doing what he does best (points, goals), Cork's Fiona O'Driscoll and Tipperary's Eimear McDonnell, for example, will struggle to beat him to the headlines; they play camogie, he plays hurling - enough said.

There are other factors too.

"If I was a Kilkenny hurler and not a hockey player I'd certainly still have my job," said hockey international and Kilkenny camogie player Fiona Connery at the weekend. Connery handed in her notice for her investment banking job late last year so she could go full-time for Ireland ahead of last September's European finals and next month's Olympic Qualifier in New Zealand, after which she will be unemployed.

"Some companies would hold on to you, others wouldn't," she said. "Naturally it's been a little bit of a strain. It's a shame because in a lot of other sports you don't have to make sacrifices like that, but that's just the way of the world, hopefully it will change in years to come."

Granted, there are plenty of amateur sportsmen who make sacrifices similar to Connery's and they, too, deserve acknowledgment, but the simple, undeniable truth is that sportswomen trail, significantly, in the recognition stakes. The sole aim of these awards, then, is to redress even a fraction of that imbalance. If the Baron was still of this earth we might even ask him to crown the monthly winners, the most robust of women, with garlands.