The adulation for relatively minor achievements by Irish amateur sports people was missing when RTE's GAA pundits discussed the Irish at the Tour de France with broadcaster Sean O'Rourke.
For many years cycling was a minority sport and few outside the die-hard racing community did any form of bike riding apart from commuting to work.
And numbers doing even that were small.
So we became accustomed to sparse coverage at best in the national media about Irish riders competing abroad or the major domestic races.
And when that coverage came, we were forgiving when the knowledge of those producing it was sometimes patchy.
When commentator Jimmy Magee, God bless him, described the yellow jersey as the yellow tunic during the Nissan Classic, we let it go.
We were just glad there was finally some cycling on RTE TV.
Advertisement
But times have changed now. Cycling is booming at all levels across the country and it’s been that way for the best part of a decade.
More Irish people than ever are cycling and more Irish riders are operating on the big stage.
GAA journalist Damian Lawlor says there is no such thing as real team work in cycling, "a bit like Formula 1". Above, Laurens Ten Dan's Lotto-Jumbo team mates cut his food up for him after he came down on his already dislocated shoulder during yesterday's stage at the Tour.
Dan Martin has won the biggest classics and is capable of beating anyone on his day, even on the hardest stages in the Tour de France.
Nicolas Roche and Philip Deignan are riding for the biggest team in the world in Team Sky and regularly exert their influence.
And in Sam Bennett Ireland for the first time since Sean Kelly has a rider capable of winning international races from sprints. And there are many, many more we could name, not least former world champion Martyn Irvine.
But the national broadcaster seems to be unaware of all of this. And its pundits don’t even seem to know the basics of the sport.
Yesterday a discussion took place on the Today with Sean O’Rourke show that had to be heard to be believed.
It’s one of the biggest current affairs radio programmes on RTE.
Dan Martin wins arguably the sport's hardest one day classic Liège–Bastogne–Liège two years ago. He has won the Tour of Lombardy classic since then. He finished 6th in the world in the UCI rankings in 2013 and 9th last year despite missing the Giro and Tour due to a broken collar bone. But he's a "journey man" according to Sean O'Rourke, who said a hurling goal in a provincial semi final would live in his memory for ever.
The host, heavy weight current affairs broadcaster Sean O’Rourke, is no expert on sport to be fair to him. And nobody would expect him to be.
But he was involved in a panel discussion with two pundits.
One was Sunday Independent sports journalist Damian Lawlor, who also forms part of Sky’s new GAA TV coverage.
The other expert was Mags D’Arcy, a camogie goalkeeper with Wexford with four All Ireland wins to her name and three All Stars.
The main focus of the discussion, as is usually the case with RTE, was on Gaelic Games.
Related News
Mostly they focused on the Galway and Kilkenny clash at semi final level in the Leinster Hurling Championship at the weekend.
Sam Bennett beats five-time 2014 Grand Tour stage winner Nacer Bouhanni for his second stage win in the Bayern Rundfahrt in May, where he also wore the yellow jersey. When sprinting to those two wins he beat this year's Milan-San Remo and Paris Roubaix winner John Degenkolb on home turf. None of the RTE panel seemed aware Bennett was even in the Tour. A major interview by Paul Kimmage with Bennett in The Sunday Independent last weekend, which Damian Lawlor writes for, was not enough to make any impact it seems.
“Were Kilkenny really seven points better than Galway?” they wondered aloud – for the longest time.
Lawlor said some of the action would “go down in the annals” of the sport.
O’Rourke described a goal by Galway’s Joe Canning as historic, adding when it hit the back of the net he turned to his daughter who was with him at the game and said: “You will tell your grandchildren you were here when that goal was scored.”
“And with three Kilkenny fellas on him... hittin' it on the swivel,” Lawlor interjected of the Fionn Mac Cumhaill moment (in an amateur game played only in Ireland).
They then waxed lyrical about two female athletes in individual sports; Leona Maguire the world’s top amateur golfer and Fiona Doyle, who has just qualified for the Olympics with a strong performance at the World University Championships.
Both are still in college, but Maguire was going to be the next Rory McIlroy we were assured. And Doyle, a "Limerick native", was also just about to explode onto the international stage, though her mere qualification for Rio was a massive achievement.
Then we came to the prospects for the Irish riders in this year's Tour de France.
None of three seemed to be aware Bennett was even in the race; he didn’t get a mention anyway.
Martin and Roche were “journey men” or “there to make others look good”.
And there is also no team work in pro cycling, apparently. Here’s the transcript:
Sean O’Rourke: Any observations about the Tour; early days?
Damian Lawlor: It’s very early days. I still think it’s going to be, like, Chris Froome, it’s going to be Contador; maybe the defending champion as well, the Italian. I think that from an Irish point of view you just want to see Nicolas Roche and Dan Martin doing as well as they can.
Sean O’Rourke: But they’re journey men; I mean, they’re working for others.
Damian Lawlor: Well yeah they are; Roche is Team Sky captain. But the big fear was he wasn’t named on the original Team Sky list. I don’t know what happen there. But suddenly he was named captain.
Sean O’Rourke: So his job is to make Froome look good?
Damian Lawlor: Yeah basically. And I mean, I see even Contador was having problems with his team mates. It’s a very, very selfish sport obviously because of the discipline that’s involved. And the idea and notion of a team within that sport doesn’t really sit well with me because it’s like motor racing; Formula 1. There’s no team ethic there at all at all. You’ve got some guy breaking his ass trying to get the top man into poll position and sometimes it’s acknowledged and sometimes the efforts aren’t. If you read books like Paul Kimmage’s ‘Rough Ride’ and if you read Nico’s columns and Dan Martin’s columns you get the sense it’s a very, very lonely existence even though you are part of a team.
Sean O’Rourke: It’s doesn’t appeal to you a great deal, does it Mags?
Mags D’Arcy: I’m all about team sports Sean to be honest. Even myself; I started to play a bit of golf there last year. And you can really see yourself, it’s a different dimension.
Topics
