My ‘first’ Olympic Games were in 1972—no, not as a competitor, but as a schoolboy spectator on summer holidays with plenty of time on my hands. Who can forget the USA’s Mark Spitz winning seven gold medals in the pool, Belarusian gymnast Olga Korbut charming the world (but not the judges), the USSR beating the USA in the basketball final by a single point with the last throw of the game (and with one second left on the clock!), or Cuban heavyweight boxer Teófilo Stevenson winning the first of three gold medals (and he might have won a fourth but for the Cuban boycott of the 1984 Los Angeles Games)? The only Irish medal was Mary Peters’s gold in the pentathlon, albeit for Team GB, its only athletics gold at the Munich Olympics. For those of us south of the border the only bit of excitement was provided by rower Seán Drea, who came seventh in the single scull.
The Ireland of 1972 truly was a ‘foreign country’. It was the year of Bloody Sunday and Bloody Friday in the North. (In spite of death threats, Mary Peters insisted on returning to live in Belfast.) While there was a veneer of modernity in the South (lots of long hair and sideburns, including on my 50-year-old father), it was only in January of that year that the éminence grise of Catholic Ireland had resigned as archbishop of Dublin, and only a year since the 1971 census indicated a society that was now—marginally—more urban than rural.
The contrast with the Ireland of 2024 and the success of our Olympic athletes (three golds, a silver and two bronze), across a variety of disciplines and from a diversity of backgrounds—geographically and in terms of sex and ethnicity—couldn’t be greater. Apart from our medal-winners, badminton player Nhat Nguyen caught my eye in a sport that in the narrow, self-segregated Ireland of old was regarded as ‘Protestant’. And in an indication that diversity is a two-way street, what about swimmer Siobhán Bernadette Haughey (great-niece of Charles J.), winner of Hong Kong’s first Olympic medals in Tokyo and two more in Paris?
When—at the time of writing—English cities (and Belfast) burn in the wake of racist violence, it is surely right to reflect on the positive side of human endeavour.
6 Palmerston Place, Dublin 7
editor@historyireland.com