Olympic failure is part of what we are

LockerRoom: Another Olympics and all over bar the blamefest. Even Tony O'Reilly winning a gold medal right there at the end isn't going to be enough to spare us from the mud slinging which has become a ritual part of our quadrennial humiliations.

So let's wade right in. It's not Pat Hickey's fault. It's not John Treacy's fault. It's the fault of our culture. This Olympics saw a few personal bests in bellyaching. Why not? Sure it's part of what we are.

Lordee. So much weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth over the Olympic Council of Ireland shifting the closing date for reaching the qualifying standards for Athens. Mark Carroll (in admiration of whom I bow to no man) spoke about a pyramid and there being only one peak in the pyramid and the OCI by shifting the date for qualification forward a little were requiring two peaks, which is impossible.

Well, I don't know. What about two pyramids? The qualifying period for getting the A or B standard for the Games ran from January 1st, 2003, to August 9th, 2004. A modest pyramid peak in the spring or summer or autumn of 2003 would have done just fine. It's not as though the most ballyhooed event in sport comes up on its would-be participants by stealth.

The athletes of more successful nations even manage that elusive double peak in Olympic year. The US Olympic trials took place in mid-July in Sacramento. The Kenyan Olympics trials took place on the 25th and 26th of June. Savage competitions both of them. And all competitors had to have achieved Olympic qualifying standards before they went to compete in their trials. Screw up and you don't go to the Olympics. It's that harsh at the Olympic trials.

In Kenya, Bernard Lagat was the only athlete to qualify again in the same discipline in which he competed in Sydney. Even the Britain team got themselves through wet and windy trials in Manchester this summer.

So, what are we moaning about?

The fact is we're the Champagne Charlies of western Europe. We're a windswept race of Bertie Big Potatoes types. We love the olé, olé, olé stuff. We love waving the flag, worshipping the big screen, making a Mexican wave from Malin to Mizen and generally shouting, "You da man2.

Beyond that we don't care much. RTÉ viewers voted Michelle as their best Olympic moment. Voted that our athletes don't get enough taxpayers' money. When the party is on, we'll always vote for another keg. Hey, hey, we're the Irish. In the bare light of morning though when we wake up with our ruddied cheeks stuck against the smelly cold lino of a Ranelagh bedsit and a steel band playing behind our eyeballs we're not quite so full of good cheer.

We've no plan. And we're sticking to it. We go back to living by the national motto - where's mine?

Honestly. Deep down we don't care.

Drugs for instance. The Sports Council does its best but there's a massive ambivalence out there. In Canada when Ben Johnson happened they had the Dubin Inquiry. They set up a centre for ethics in sport. When Michelle happened, when Cathal Lombard happened, when Geraldine Hendricken happened, we shrugged. Jimmy Magee talked us through it.

Sport in Ireland happens despite ourselves. It happens to a large degree because of the curious organism that is the GAA. It happens because of volunteer effort. Sometimes it's half-arsed. Sometimes it's three-quarter-arsed. Occasionally, despite ourselves, a Sonia O'Sullivan flashes across our firmament, too good to be held earthbound by our failings.

We don't even approach the subject of sport at school level. Physical Education is an A-level subject in Britain. Specific schools in Britain are sports-streamed and most schools there have sports programmes that shame us. Why this should be is something of a mystery to me. We assess language. We assess art. We assess this, that and the other. Sport, we leave be.

Why not a Leaving Cert course in Sports Studies? A course which might require a certain demonstrable level of fitness, the undertaking of certified coaching qualification in a sport, a background in ethics, a little academic understanding of sports and leisure management, of physiology, sports psychology, etc.

So, there's that. There's our ambivalence on the business of taking the smarties. There's our lack of essential seriousness about sport. There's that odd kink in our culture of self-celebration. And then there's the girls.

You know - the girls? The people who make up half, well, slightly more than half, of the population. We don't do enough for them. To Athens we sent 15 women and 35 men. Five of the women were competing in the non-gender-divided horsey events.

There's a massive pool of potential there that suffers official and cultural neglect.

Girls are just waiting to be asked. At present women's Gaelic football is well organised and efficiently marketed and it is cleaning up. The area of my own experience is camogie and happy though our existence is, the Gaelic football is starting to make camogie suffer.

If only every sport could evangelise like Gaelic football though. Having two daughters leaves me with a little experience of athletics as well. Said daughters were in an athletics club once. We'd drop them off at the park for training. Pick them up after training.

One winter evening it started raining heavily so we decided to head back to the park early in case the coach wanted to wrap up and get home.

Too late. Found a little huddle of kids alone in the park, wet and crying, darkness falling. Completely abandoned by coach. End of athletics, thanks. They never even got their first taste of steroids.

In America it's a little different and not just with the steroids. They have something called Title IX. A big and clumsy instrument of state, but, hey on a broad basis, it works, it does what it says on the label.

Title IX was introduced back in 1972 and concerns itself with the overall equity of treatment and opportunity in athletics. Schools and colleges have the flexibility to choose sports programmes based on student-body interest, geographic influence, budget restraints, and gender ratio. It doesn't mean you have to have a female quarterback on your gridiron team or exactly the same amount of money is spent per women's and men's basketball player. Title IX means the focus is on the necessity for women and girls to have equal opportunities with men and boys on the whole. Not on an individual, sport-specific basis but just as a general principle.

Yes, yes, yes. It works. The stats as taken from recent reviews of Title IX are impressive.

l In 2002 there were more than 150,000 women participating in intercollegiate athletics - a four-fold increase since 1971.

l In 1995, women made up 37 per cent of college student athletes, compared to 15 per cent in 1972.

l In 1996, 2.4 million high-school girls competing as athletes represented 39 per cent of all high-school athletes, compared to only 300,000, or 7.5 per cent, in 1971. An eight-fold increase.

l The number of female students participating in high-school sports has risen by 847 per cent.

l American women won a record 19 Olympic medals in the 1996 Summer Games. That spread of achievement has continued.

l In 1972, 132,299 young girls played high-school basketball. By the mid-1990s that number had increased to 412,576, an increase of over 200 per cent.

l The phenomenal and ongoing success of women's soccer in the US is a product of Title IX having opened so many doors.

The benefits keep coming. You challenge girls and they give you back something. Eighty per cent of female managers of Fortune 500 companies in the US have a sports background. High-school girls who participate in team sports are less likely to drop out of school, smoke, drink or become unintentionally pregnant.

And down the line the health benefits are huge. Fewer taxpayers' dollars being spent on everything from osteoporosis to breast cancer to heart disease.

What do we do? We tackle our drink culture by keeping kids out of pubs after nine, so we can get down to the serious, melancholydrinking without them seeing us. We brush sponsorships from unworthy sources aside. We're failures but we're pious failures.

For us the Olympics are over now. There will be the splat, splat, splat of mud being slung for a while. There'll be talk of 2016 and all the medals we'll win then. There'll be the odd drugs case and there'll be the occasional loola in a suit who suggests we are worthy people to host the Games.

Mostly though we'll go back to doing what we do best, waiting for the next big party.