The Art Of Winning

Patrick Ryan takes a look at some of Ireland’s less well known Olympians, who from the very start showed the world how medals are won.

Paris 2024 marks the 100th anniversary of Ireland’s participation in the Olympic games as an independent nation.

Although the efforts of Cork’s Pat O’Callaghan in winning gold at the hammer-throw in Amsterdam in 1928 are often cited as Ireland’s first Olympic medal that honour actually belongs to a Sligo native, whose success was achieved from the comfort of his armchair and the River Liffey was centre stage.
For most of us the dedication and training required to make an Olympic team, never mind finish on the winners’ podium is an impossible dream.

However in 1924 one of Ireland’s greatest painters, Sligo’s Jack B Yeats, brother of poet WB Yeats, won silver barely breaking a sweat in Art (based on a sporting theme) for his famous oil painting of spectators cheering on competitors from O’Connell Bridge. “Liffey Swim” had been completed a year earlier, and the Olympic win came exactly a century before Sligo’s Mona McSharry took bronze for Ireland in the pool in Paris 2024.

Yeats’s medal-winning painting has been seen by millions across the world, in the National Gallery, online, in books and magazines, and of course on letters, parcels, and postcards in 2019 when it was reproduced as a postage stamp from An Post to celebrate the centenary of the annual event on the Liffey.
Painting wasn’t the only event the newly independent Ireland excelled at in Paris 1924, though the work of Dubliner Oliver Syngon Gogarty is probably less well-known to the general public.

Gogarty’s poem Ode to the Tailtean Games, took bronze in Art (covering painting, literature, music, sculpture and architecture) at the Games of the VIII Olympiad.

The piece had been written at the request of the Irish Free State to promote a mini-Olympics for sports and sportspeople of Irish extraction, with most events taking place in Croke Park, and was printed in the official programme, with music by Louis O’Brien, before being sung by a choir during the opening festivities that August in Dublin, where Gogarty secured a second medal for literature for his An Offering of Swans and Other Poems.

Ironically Gogarty could probably have competed in Paris, and Dublin, as an athlete that year.
The Dubliner excelled as a cyclist and footballer in Trinity College while studying medicine, and was a handy swimmer too as he proved in his own Liffey swim, taking to the water to escape pursuing Republicans during the Civil War. He might not have won a medal for that effort, but we did name a pub after the famous writer, raconteur, doctor, pilot and politician, a trade-off many an Irishman, then and now would surely settle for.

Gogarty wasn’t impressed with Ode to the Tailtean Games apparently, later describing it as rubbish, though he did attain literary immortality in the guise of Malachi “Buck” Mulligan in Ulysses by his onetime friend James Joyce.Perhaps Gogarty’s efforts also helped inspire others to compete in Dublin.

Many Olympians were among the 6,500 men and women from across the world competing across 20 different categories, with the 1928 Tailtean games increased to over 30 categories including events as diverse as handball, camogie, chess, motorboat racing, and dancing.

The majority were of Irish extraction but some competitors had no known links to this island.

Arguably most famous of all was Johnny Weissmuller, who in 1924 claimed a Tailtean gold in swimming at the pond in Dublin Zoo; handy practice for his future role as Tarzan across the Atlantic in Hollywood, California starring alongside Roscommon woman Maureen O’Sullivan as Jane.

With Paris 2024 in full swing and Daniel Wiffen taking gold with a fantastic swim in the 800m Mens Freestyle hopes are high that we can add to our total of Irish medal wins. That’s not counting the likes of John Pius Boland from Dublin who took golds in both the tennis singles and doubles at the first modern Olympics in Athens in 1896, insisting that the Irish flag, not the Union flag, be raised at the medal presentations, though the result is still recorded as a win for Great Britain.

For those who take home a medal from Paris with a piece of the Eiffel Tower embedded in its centre a place in the heart of the Irish everywhere is guaranteed. And if you can take it just one step further?
Who knows, maybe even a drink, on the house, awaits whenever you pop into the pub we’ll name after you. As the original Oliver Syngon Gogarty himself wrote 100 years ago:
“Where should follow Sport but Song, And the victor but renown?”
Comhghairdeas, agus sláinte.