When Irishmen mined gold for other lands Martin Sheridan from Bohola, Co Mayo, throwing the discus for the United States at the London Olympics of 1908The period from the birth of the modern Olympics up to the birth of the state was a rich one for Irish sport, as this book illustrates. Dozens of Irishmen won the contests for gold, although all had to stand on the podium as the Stars and Stripes, Union Jack or Red Ensign was hoisted up the flagpole. The first gold medallist, John Pius Boland, who won tennis in 1896, objected to the union flag being flown, and he was not the only athlete to bridle at being labelled 'British'. The period saw the last flourishing of the great period of Irish throwers and jumpers who led the world for more than 30 years. Men such as Tom Kiely from Ballyneale, Co Tipperary, who broke 28 world records in his career, and five-time gold medallist Martin Sheridan from Bohola, Co Mayo, were the leading athletes of their time, but the field sports tradition soon died out in rural Ireland in favour of Gaelic football and hurling. The GAA was first and foremost formed to promote and run athletics, with team sports a lesser consideration. Their rise led to a decline in track and field in Ireland, but Kevin McCarthy shows that was not the case in the Irish communities in the United States. The GAA stateside produced several leading athletes who collected a sackful of gold medals in those early Olympic Games. The author also shines a light on the extraordinary story of the Olympic gaelic football and hurling matches, staged as demonstration sports at St Louis in 1904 (Chicago Fenians beat St Louis Innisfalls by 10 points to nil, while the Innisfalls won the hurling). The strong underlying theme of the immensely detailed Gold, Silver and Green is of Irish sport struggling with its changing nature and finding a new identity as the nature of the nation changes. By 1908 nationalist leaders such as Roger Casement were urging that a separate Irish team be entered for the London Olympics, while by 1920 there was a near mutiny at Antwerp when competitors demanded Ireland be given recognition as a separate entity. The foundation of the Olympic Council of Ireland is covered, along with a delicious scandal when its secretary, JJ Keane, clumsily boasted of 'the Irish Race Olympics' (which became the Tailteann Games) in a letter to Baron de Coubertin. The baron seems to have been quite miffed by this potential rival and had to be placated by Keane. The 1924 Paris Olympics, when the team was called Ireland – not the Irish Free State – completes the story. And who was the new nation's first Olympic medallist? Only Jack B Yeats, who won a silver medal for painting for 'The Liffey Swim'. Kevin McCarthy's comprehensive volume is a fascinating story of sport during a crucial era in our history.

Gold, Silver and Green is a book about sport but also about the politics of sport. Dealing with the first quarter century or so of the modern Olympic Games, the book examines how Irish participants fought not only sporting battles but often significant political ones too, given the fact that Ireland did not have independent nation The standard of athletics sports in Ireland in the latter half of the nineteenth century was phenomenal. A huge proportion of the great athletes in this period came from a small pocket of rich countryside know as the Golden Vale. North Cork, west Tipperary and much of County Limerick may well have produced more world records, more international and Olympic champions than any other rural are in modern times. The first modern Olympic champion, James Connolly, might well have represented the USA but both his parents came from the Aran Islands. The first brothers to win Olympic athletic medals were Irish; the first time gold, silver and bronze medals in an athletic event were won by men from the same country involved three Irishmen from neighbouring counties; the first athlete to win five Olympic titles was Mayo-man Martin Sheridan. The famous efforts of decathlon champion Tom Kiely to represent 'Tipperary and Ireland' in 1904, and of world long-jump record holder Peter O'Connor to climb a flagpole armed with an Irish flag are given ample coverage in the work. Author Kevin McCarthy is a Senior Inspector with Department of Education & Science and "Gold, Silver & Green: The Irish Olympic Journey, 1896-1924" will be published on February 1, retailing at €39.

SUCH is the popularity of hurling, football, soccer and rugby that the majority of people, when asked to associate another word with the word ‘sport’, will inevitably respond with one of the following; hurling, football, soccer or rugby. This is not surprising because we are fed a constant diet of these four games by the various elements of the sports media. The improving sports book industry is also dominated by publications devoted to the big four. Other than Kieran Shannon’s recent Hanging from the Rafters, there are very few sports books that examine the social dimension behind the facts of sport. The Americans have led the way in true sports history. These writers not only produce the facts of their topic but explain them in the context of their time. A new book, Gold, Silver and Green: The Irish Olympic Journey 1896 to 1924 by Kevin McCarthy was published by Cork University Press last week. It is a book that can sit comfortably on the history as well as the sports bookshelf. This book examines the stories and circumstance of over 75 Olympic medals which were won by Irish-born athletes in the Olympics prior to 1924. The number is even greater when you include those of Irish parents who were born abroad. The author, Kevin McCarthy is a native of Cappoquin, County Waterford. He is a senior inspector with the Department of Education and Science. He is a member of the International Society of Olympic Historians, the Hibernian Athletics Historical Association and on the advisory board of the ‘Winged Fist’, a historical society dedicated to Irish American athletics. He is also a life-long sports fan and member of Cappoquin- Affane GAA club. When asked how this book evolved he replied “The initial research for Gold, Silver and Green was undertaken as part of my PhD studies in UCC on the ‘Irish and Irish American Involvement in the Olympic Games prior to independence and its impact on nationalism and national identity’. Personally, I feel the importance of sport has been underestimated in academic circles. ” This begs the question what can we hope to learn from the book? “I think the book shows how Irish athletics was at the top of the tree in a wide range of events when the Olympics began. The traditions of the Gaelic Athletic Association (IAAA) in areas like hammer throwing, shot put and jumping events were very strong, but it also shows that the GAA did not have an international vision capable of using the great Irish athletes to establish an Irish identity abroad. “The irony was that a perceived unionist athletic body, the Irish Amateur Athletic Association, was probably responsible for getting more Irish competitors onto this new world stage at the Olympics. What also emerges is the huge role played by Irish sportsmen, many of them in the Irish American Athletic Club in New York, in gaining acceptance for the Irish in the USA, and in helping things like fundraising for the 1916 Rising into the bargain. “It also shows the degree to which a wide range of political figures like Roger Casement, Arthur Griffith and Michael Collins could see the value of an Irish Olympic team as a means of establishing our international identity.” Kevin feels that the GAA was less nationalistic prior to 1916 than people might think. In the course of outlining the amusing story of the Irish Cycling team in Stockholm in 1912, he explains that the row between the GAA and the IAAA at the time was more about the control of Irish sport than nationalist politics. The events of 1916 changed everything and by the early 1920s the IAAA were as good as gone. “However, the take-over by the GAA of mainstream Irish athletics did not result in a great athletic or Olympic revival, with hurling and football now very firmly established in nationalist circles and the rest of the world having caught up with and passed Irish standards in Olympic sports by independence.” The appreciation of the achievements of these pre 1924 Olympians is still of the hit-and-miss variety as Kevin found in the course of his research. “While some Olympic medals are well protected in museums, as with Tom Kiely’s 1904 decathlon medal in South Tipperary museum in Clonmel, I have, on more than one occasion, been ‘introduced’ to Olympic medals taken from hiding places in teapots or displayed in less than secure locations.” One of the unusual stories in the book concerns the proposal to play an exhibition of hurling at the 1900 Olympics which were held in Paris. There are suggestions that a Cork team was to take part in the hurling exhibition. A report in the Kerry Sentinel explained; “The exiled Gaels of London are sending teams to a Paris exhibition, Cork being unable to accept the invitation to do so... There, in the intellectual capital of the world… will be heard the crash of the camán, and I hope the music of the Gaelic tongue on the lips of excited hurlers.” Another report, in the United Irishman, said that the game was to be between the “Chicago and London Gaels although the original idea was that Cork and the Chicago men should play.” It should be added that apart from newspaper reports nothing has been found in either the Olympic or GAA records to suggest that an exhibition game was ever played. What is known however is that hurling and football were exhibited at St Louis in 1904. Munster was the power base of Athletics in the latter half of the 19th century. This is reflected in the Olympic success of athletes from the province. Kevin McCarthy’s take on this is that economic circumstances and tradition played a large part in Munster’s high profile. “Many of the great Irish weight throwers and jumpers came from good farming stock, with good protein rich diets and more available time and training facilities than urban dwellers or employees. “Tradition played a huge part too. The quality of the sports meetings in places like Kilmallock, Clonmel, Banteer, etc was world class, with Irish national records broken at such meetings very regularly and occasionally, world records too. Although our greatest Olympian before independence, Martin Sheridan (9 medals, including 5 gold) came from Co Mayo. “Munster athletes included Tom Kiely from Tipperary broke 28 world records in his career, while Peter O’Connor from Waterford broke four world long jump records in less than two years. In the Golden Vale area, John Flanagan from near Kilmallock won three Olympic hammer titles, Pat O’Callaghan from near Banteer won two and individual titles were won by Matt McGrath (Nenagh) and Paddy Ryan of Pallasgreen, all between 1900 and 1932 and all hailing from within a thirty mile radius of Croom, Co Limerick.” Gold, Silver and Green is a giant leap forward in helping sports fans and historians understand and appreciate why and how our relish for competitive sport evolved. It reminds us (if we need to be reminded at all!) that sport and politics have never been too far apart. As Kevin McCarthy points out in his conclusion however, the story of these Olympians of the pre-1924 era deserves commemoration in its own right. Their success raises questions of how generations of political and sporting bodies have failed to develop our international athletic prowess in any consistent way since the foundation of the state. In the last paragraph of the book, Arthur Griffith’s observation that ‘revolutions are slow and often barely perceptible things’ is alluded to. If Griffith is correct, we can only hope that this book could be the beginning of a proper and reasoned debate on how to harness and re-ignite the sporting prowess of this country for the health and benefit of not just the elite, but for everyone.

Cracking tale of Ireland’s impact on the early modern Olympics Few Irish people today realise they are the heirs to the world’s greatest tradition of hammer-throwing. Throwing weights around a field once captivated the Irish imagination as rugby does now. In the eight Olympiads between 1900 and 1932, an Irish-born athlete won the hammer seven times - a stunning record of dominance unmatched even by the steroidfuelled Soviets of later years. You could look through Olympic records without realising such an era of Irish supremacy ever happened because the first five wins are credited to the USA. Likewise, the Dublin-born winner of the first Olympic tennis championship appears in the record books as John Pius Boland (GBR). Irish athletes could not compete for Ireland until the Paris Games of 1924. By then our slide into athletic mediocrity was under way, and our only medallists that year were Jack B Yeats (silver, Art) and Oliver St John Gogarty (bronze, Poetry). The question of why Ireland suddenly stopped producing world class track and field athletes is not central to this richly-detailed and absorbing book, but, intriguingly, Kevin McCarthy places much of the blame on the GAA. In his view, the Association was narrowly focused on developing hurling and football at the expense of athletics and prioritised political point-scoring against the IAAA over the best interests of Irish sport. The IAAA was the Irish Amateur Athletic Association, whose athletes competed under the banner of Great Britain and Ireland. Many chafed at the designation. The 1906 Intercalated Games in Athens saw what is reckoned to be the first political protest at an Olympic event, when irate long jump silver medallist Peter O’Connor delighted spectators by scaling a 20-foot pole to wave an Erin Go Bragh flag in protest at the Union flag that had been hoisted in honour of his achievement. McCarthy shows how Irish aspirations to sporting independence foundered on the rocks of pre-war geopolitics. Baron de Coubertin, the conservative French aristocrat who founded the Olympic movement, was friendly with the conservative aristocrats who ran British sport; the signing of the Entente Cordiale between France and Britain in 1904 scuppered any chance that his IOC would press the Irish case. By contrast, the IOC was happy to grant Olympic recognition to the Habsburg province of Bohemia and the Russian fiefdom of Finland: de Coubertin didn’t mind upsetting the hostile Habsburgs and Romanovs. At least not until 1907, when Russia joined the AngloFrench alliance and Finland’s independent status was swiftly revoked. McCarthy’s story comes alive with the 1908 London Games, a triumph for Irish-American athletes and a carnival of Brit-bashing. At a time of anxiety over Britain’s fading imperial glory, the last thing the Games organisers needed was an American team managed by the ‘‘renegade Irishman’’ James Sullivan, captained by an ‘‘Irish Whale’’ in Martin Sheridan, and roared on by a scabrous press, determined to ‘‘knock the spots off the Britishers’’. Sheridan, a Mayoman who won discus gold in 1904 and 1908, emerges as a towering figure. He is said to have persuaded the US flag bearer at the opening ceremony not to dip the US flag to King Edward VII with the line ‘‘this flag dips for no earthly King’’, inspiring a tradition that endures to this day. An uncompromising nationalist , Sheridan regarded Irishmen who competed under the aegis of Great Britain and Ireland as traitors. Sheridan was also an accomplished wind-up merchant possessed of a Runyonesque prose style. ‘‘The American team was handed a real sour lemon here when the tug-of-war event was announced," he wrote in the New York Evening World. The Americans took the field in regular shoes, and ‘‘what was our surprise to find the English team wearing shoes as big as North River ferryboats, with steel-topped heels and steel cleats, while spikes an inch long stuck out of the soles ... they had to waddle like County Mayo ganders ... The shoes they wore were the biggest things over here and clearly made for the purpose of getting away with the event by hook as well as by crook’’. The indignant English team offered a rematch, the Americans refused. ‘‘The explanation that [they]. . .wore only ‘‘their usual boots’ is a characteristic instance of English hypocrisy," the Gaelic American newspaper taunted. ‘‘Lord Desborough might just as well have said, ‘Why, my dear sir, these are exactly the same boots that Lancashire men kick their wives with,’ for all its relevancy to the charge of unfairness." Other such cuttings get across a sense of the strange fervour of the time: the extreme nationalism; the naked rancour and contempt; the obsession with sporting achievement as an indicator of racial vigour. The book is a labour of love, and while many readers will find that it contains much more information about century-old issues of sports administration than they strictly require, McCarthy has made a valuable contribution to the study of an aspect of Irish history that should be better known.

Flying the flag: Reliving Ireland’s golden days of Olympic glory By Ryle Dwyer THE Winter Olympic Games opened in Vancouver, Canada, early this morning (Irish time). The controversy over the Irish bobsleigh team prompted memories of earlier controversies about Irish participation in the Olympics. In a timely book, Gold, Silver and Green, Kevin McCarthy covers phenomenal Irish successes at the early modern Games (see review in today’s Weekend). The next summer Olympics will be in London in two years’ time, but no one could dare expect Irish-born athletes to perform as successfully as when the Olympics were first held in London in 1908. Irish-born competitors won 37 Olympic medals that year. Many may recall the sensational incident at the 1968 Games in Mexico, where two American athletes gave a black power salute after being presented with their medals for the 200 meters. Both stood without shoes as an expression of black poverty. Each also wore a black glove on one hand. Tommie Smith, the gold medal winner, also wore a black scarf, while John Carlos, the bronze medallist, wore a necklace of beads, which he said "were for those individuals that were lynched, or killed and that no one said a prayer for". As the Stars Spangled Banner was being played, each raised his gloved hand in a clenched-fist salute. It was a dignified protest. "If I win, I am American, not a black American. But if I did something bad, then they would say I am a Negro," Smith explained. "We are black and we are proud of being black. Black America will understand what we did tonight." But White America didn’t understand. Avery Brundage, the American President of the International Olympic Committee, demanded that Smith and Carlos be expelled from the Games and banned for life. American officials delayed until Brundage threatened to expel the entire US track team. It was a far cry from Athens in 1906 when Peter O’Connor of Waterford protested at the raising of the Union Jack for his second place in the long jump. He climbed up the flagpole and waved a homemade Irish flag, while Con O’Leary from Charleville waved a similar flag standing on the ground.They weren’t suspended. O’Connor went on to win the triple jump in which O’Leary was second, while O’Leary won the high jump. He also won a silver medal in the high jump as part of the Great Britain and Ireland (GB&I) team in 1908. His colleague Tim Ahearne of Athea, County Limerick, won gold in the triple jump, and Joseph Deakin from Wicklow led GB&I to a win in the three-mile team race, while Denis Horgan of Lyre, near Banteer, won silver in the shot put. Bobby Kerr – a native of Enniskillen – won a gold medal in the 200 meters and a bronze in the 100 meters representing Canada. But Irish-born athletes had the biggest impact competing for the USA. The Irish American Athletic Club (IAAC) of New York had 17 competitors forming the nucleus of the American track and field team in London. At the opening ceremony, all but one of the flag carriers dipped their flags as a mark of respect as they passed King Edward VII in the stand. The sole exception was Ralph Rose, the American flag carrier, who reportedly said: "This flag dips for no earthly king." The incident set the tone for a bitter rivalry, approaching a sporting war between the British and Americans. The Irish-Americans were blamed for the flag incident.The president of the US Amateur Athletic Union was John E Sullivan, the American-born son of a construction worker from Co Kerry. "We all know Sullivan well," wrote William Sloan of the American Olympic Committee, "his great faults are those of his birth and his breeding." Other white people tended to look down on the Irish in America, so Irish-American athletes saw the Games as a chance to refute the ignorant calumnies depicting them as a debauched and inferior race. They considered the Games a chance to defeat Britain on behalf of both the USA and Ireland. Martin Sheridan of Bohola, Co Mayo, won two gold medals and a bronze in field events, bringing his total medal haul to nine at the Games in St Louis, Athens and London. John Flanagan from near Kilmallock won the hammer throw to become the first man to win the same Olympic event at three consecutive Games on the four-year cycle. Irish-born competitors made a clean sweep of the hammer medals in London. Flanagan’s IAAC club mate, Matt McGrath from near Nenagh won the silver, while Con Walsh from Carriganimmy, Co Cork, won the bronze medal representing Canada. John Barrett, from near Ballyduff, Co Kerry, finished fifth in the shot put behind Ralph Rose, the controversial American flag carrier, but Barrett was hampered by an injury after one of the Americans "accidentally" dropped the shot on his foot. Incidentally, Barrett’s twin brother, Ed, won a gold medal in the tug of war and a bronze in wrestling. John Carpenter won the 400 meters for the USA, but was disqualified after it was ruled that he deliberately ran wide to prevent the British runner Wyndham Halswelle passing him in the straight. Carpenter was disqualified and the race was re-run in lanes without him. The other competitors refused to run, so Halswelle became the only athlete to win Olympic gold in a walkover. The athletics came to dramatic end when Dorando Pietri of Italy staggered into the stadium and collapse while leading in the marathon. With Johnny Hayes – the New York-born son of an Irish couple from Nenagh – approaching fast, British officials picked up Pietri and essentially helped him to finish first. But he was then disqualified, and Hayes was awarded the gold medal. The 1908 Games brought Irish-Americans "closer to sporting, social and political acceptance in the USA than ever before," according to Kevin McCarthy. Their exploits provided a huge boost for their full acceptance in the USA as Americans. Many Irish people thought there would no holding them, if Ireland were independent. Matt McGrath, the man from Nenagh who won silver in the hammer in London, went on to win gold at Stockholm in 1912. He was still competing for the USA in his 50th year at the Paris Games of 1924. He actually won the silver medal to become the oldest track and field medallist of all time. That was the year that Ireland was first officially represented in the Olympics. By then, any prospect of powerful Irish athletic performance had evaporated. In the next 84 years Irish competitors would win only four medals in track and field events. Pat O’Callaghan won two gold medals, Bob Tisdall and Ronnie Delany won one each, and John Tracy won a silver medal. By contrast, Irish-born competitors won the equivalent of 16 gold, 10 silver and two bronze medals between 1904 and 1912. Of course, the Irish also won medals in the 1924 Games in Paris – for cultural events. Jack B Yeats won an Olympic silver medal in "mixed painting," while Oliver St. John Gogarty won a bronze for his poetry in the "mixed literature competition". This story appeared in the printed version of the Irish Examiner Saturday, February 13, 2010