Cathal Dennehy: Is Irish funding about driving future success or rewarding performances?
FUNDING: Ireland’s Chris O’Donnell, Rhasidat Adeleke, Tom Barr and Sharlene Mawdsley celebrate with their gold medals Pic: ©INPHO/Morgan Treacy
There’s a famous quote attributed to legendary distance-runner Emil Zatopek: “An athlete cannot run with money in his pockets. He must run with hope in his heart and dreams in his head.” The Czech athlete was certainly true to that, his achievements – 18 world records, four Olympic gold medals – all occurring in the amateur era, Zatopek running not for financial reward but for love of country and the thrill of seeing how great he could be. In 1996, four years before his death, Zatopek was asked about the modern Olympic landscape and said the amateur approach was long gone, adding: “Everything depends on sponsorship.”
Almost 30 years later, that’s even more the case, the relationship between funding and medals being a clear, causative one. There are many reasons Ireland enjoyed its most successful Olympics in Paris but the biggest is that the government now invests significantly more than it used to, providing €25 million for high-performance sport last year, two and a half times what it gave in 2016, when Ireland won just two Olympic medals in Rio.
That’s not to say money is the sole reason or that it had an immediate impact, the key word here being investment, the effects of which only manifest down the line. This year, Irish high-performance sport will receive €27m, a figure which will rise to over €30m by the LA Olympics.
The seven-medal haul in Paris – with four gold – was not some freakish anomaly or miraculous feat of over-achieving by little old Ireland. It’s the new normal, the goal being that Ireland will consistently win 8-10 medals at the Olympics from 2028 onwards. That’s well on track.
On Wednesday, Sport Ireland published their funding allocations for 2025 and the one guarantee when sharing such figures is there will be (bad) blood, with sports turning against each other like rival siblings and many questioning individual athlete allocations.
“Pennies, we need to support these athletes properly,” responded one person on X. Another took aim at the greyhound industry, which will receive almost €20m of government funding this year. Another said it was “ridiculous” that Chris O’Donnell, who helped Ireland to mixed relay gold at the Europeans last year, got €40,000 while “genuine world class athletes like Sarah Lavin and Sarah Healy” only got €25,000.
Sharlene Mawdsley and Sophie Becker, like O’Donnell, were also elevated to €40,000 not due to individual results – which would have seen them on a lower level – but due to vast relay contributions. Athletics Ireland took some flak for that but the decision was actually made by Sport Ireland, a statement of intent about the importance of relays in the years ahead.
The reason can be summed up in two words: Rhasidat Adeleke. If the 22-year-old stays healthy, then Ireland will have a lethal one-lap weapon for the next two to three Olympic cycles, her youth and ability to split 48 seconds meaning Ireland could be genuine world or Olympic medal contenders if she has decent backup. With anchor-leg queen Mawdsley (26) and Becker (27) both certain to commit until Los Angeles, Sport Ireland knows that as things stand, the best athletics medal chances for Ireland in LA are likely to be Adeleke over 400m and any relay that she’s part of.
At this point, it’s worth asking why funding exists: is it to support athletes towards major medals so the nation can enjoy moments like it did in Paris? If so, then it’s worth considering the chief criticism levelled at the carding scheme: that it functions more as a reward system than a true investment, with athletes receiving the requisite support at a time in their career when, usually, they no longer need it.
Very few Olympic athletes, even medallists, walk away from sport with substantial savings, so it’s only fair Sport Ireland would give its top performers €40,000 a year to acknowledge and support their contributions. But if this is about impact, then will that sum make any difference to the performances of Paul O’Donovan, Daniel Wiffen or Adeleke? There were many times in their careers when it would, but given where they’ve risen to, that’s no longer the case.
The reality is that right now, there’s a Wiffen or O’Donovan or Adeleke who is struggling to pay their rent, to cover the costs of committing to sport – who is either on the way up or lost in the wilderness, their talent potentially going to waste as they struggle with injuries or career demands or a lack of parental support. Such athletes would greatly benefit from just a fraction of €40,000, but they won’t get that until they produce top-level results.
There’s an argument for Ireland to follow the UK and include means testing as part of its funding model. In the UK, athletes whose total income exceeds £65,000 get a reduction in state funding which, depending on their income, could mean they get nothing at all. They still receive various supports – medical assistance, training camps etc – but those at the helm know there’s zero performance impact in giving Keely Hodgkinson their top-level allocation, £28,000, when she’s already earning many multiples of that via her Nike contract and endorsements.
If funding is about driving future success, and less about rewarding performances, then why not divert more towards those on the way up with the requisite talent? At the recent Schools’ International Cross Country, two Irish athletes in their early teens, Daire Whelan and Freya Renton, hammered the best of Britain to take easy victories. They might not develop into senior medallists, of course, but they could also be the next Mark English and Sarah Healy. It’d be great if their parents didn’t have to fork out for running shoes, physios or training camps as they chase that dream, if they were provided with decent funding on the road to a medal podium rather than being given it after they’ve arrived.
And stop me if you’ve heard this before, but if Irish sport wants the biggest bang for its buck with its high-performance investment, then the €1.5m allocated to coaching needs to be several times higher. As Jeremy Lyons, longtime coach of Sophie Becker, told me last year: “This might be controversial, but if someone said to me to balance this up, I’d maybe give slightly less money to athletes if it meant it was going to be coaches in situ supported. To swing the pendulum a bit to that side.”
It's similar to what John Coghlan, coach to two Olympic 100m hurdles medallists last year, told me: “The athletes don’t need that much money as long as you can provide them with a really good coaching setup and be in a situation where they can train full time. That’s all you need. It’s not that complicated.”
Neither Lyons nor Coghlan said the above out of self-interest: Coghlan is based in Florida and has no plans to return home, while Lyons is now focused only on grassroots. They said it because both have decades of experience of how Irish sport operates and, despite the success, they know where the model still falls behind other nations. Investment is critical, but only at certain points of an athlete’s career. And all too often in Irish sport, it comes along too late to make an impact.
