For a brief period, in 1924–5, the National Athletics and Cycling Association of Ireland (NACA) enjoyed undisputed jurisdiction over the island in athletics, cross-country and cycling, receiving formal recognition from the International Amateur Athletics Federation (IAAF). The association was the product of an uneasy post-independence embrace between the Athletics Council of the separatist GAA and … Read more
At the 1924 games, the only Olympic honours accredited to ‘Irlande’ in Paris were in what was known as the ‘Concourse d’Art’. Poet Oliver St John Gogarty won a joint third place for a work entitled ‘Ode to the Tailteann Games’, and the 53-year-old Jack B. Yeats, already of world renown, won silver in the … Read more
The Paris Olympics of 1924 represented the official debut of Ireland on the Olympic stage. Although Irish representatives competed in some of the artistic events that preceded the games proper (see Jack B. Yeats’s Liffey Swim, pp 26–7), the first sporting competitors for the new nation were sixteen footballers, culled from four clubs playing in … Read more
John Pius Boland was Ireland’s first Olympic champion but he was not our first ‘gold’ medallist—his prizes in Athens in 1896 were silver medals and olive wreaths. Up until London, the awards for first, second or other places in any Olympic final were at the discretion of the organising committee of the games concerned. Such … Read more
When John Pius Boland, born in Capel Street, Dublin, went to Athens for the first modern Olympic Games in 1896 he did so as a scholar-tourist, seeking respite from a semester of study at the University of Bonn and, previous to that, his studies for a postgraduate law degree in Oxford. While in Athens, following … Read more