The local sports day was our own Olympics
The Naughton family from Bonnifinglas are pictured enjoying the village's Sports Day in 2018. The Sports Day will again take place next Sunday, August 4, commencing at 12 noon.
As we face into the Olympic Games of 2024, we have in prospect a feast of human athletic endeavour. It seems the ambition to be the strongest or the fastest or the most accurate is part of our human condition; an opportunity to prove our worth. The Olympic Games also provides a reminder of times past; a day for the parish, where such age-old rituals were played out in a much simpler form. Great victories are achieved everywhere – in the arenas of ancient Greece or in a grassy field somewhere in the Ox Mountains.
Irish myths and legends are peppered with stories of great feats of bravery and athleticism. Considerable value was placed on achievement and victory. It was how young men proved themselves and it was because of such abilities that tribes, and indeed whole nations, were protected. The following is a short account of Setanta, one of the great heroes of ancient Ireland.
Setanta quickly made his mark; his abilities and ambitions gaining him notice. Conor was so impressed that he invited Setanta to come with him to a feast, held in honour of the most important warriors of Ulster and hosted by the blacksmith, Culann. Culann unleashed his fierce hound to defend his patch while the party was in full swing. Setanta, arriving late, faced certain death… or so it seemed.
However, Setanta was as quick a flash. With his perfect aim, he struck his sliotar at the dog with great force – and killed it instantly. Culann was very relieved Setanta was safe and so impressed were fellow warriors by his promise that Setanta became forever more as Cú Chulainn – ‘Hound of Culann’.
Siobhán Doyle (RTÉ Brainstorm) sets out the origins of the ancient Tailteann Games, the Irish equivalate of the Olympic Games. It appears that the concept, and indeed the content, of such games has changed very little over the millennia.
Doyle goes on to tell us about the rise and fall of the Tailteann Games. They were restored after the formation of a new and independent Ireland but after a spectacular start, politics, financial difficulties and the attraction of a growing Olympic movement, the Tailteann Games withered and died.
The Olympic Games was an athletic festival that originated in ancient Greece and was revived in the late 19th century. Today, the Games are open to all, even the top professional athletes in basketball and soccer. The ancient Olympic Games included several of the sports that are still part of the Summer Games programme. These Games have come to be regarded as the world’s foremost sports competition.
Our own Community Games structure was set up in 1967, initially only in Dublin, to deal with the problems of the lack of leisure-time activities for young people. In the first games, 3,000 took part, the following year it was 5,000 and today, over 160,000 children compete for the chance to make it to the National Festivals. Many famous Irish athletes first honed their abilities in Community Games. These include Sonia O'Sullivan, Eamonn Coghlan and John Treacy.
Up until the introduction of the Community Games, there was hardly a parish in Ireland that didn’t hold an annual Sports Day. Known simply as, The Sports, the day was often organised by the local GAA club. This day in late summer was an event for the whole community. It was often an ad hoc affair, organised at short notice and held in a centrally located field. There were the few serious athletic events such as the mile race and the 100-yard dash but there were also the novelty events such as the egg and spoon race, the three-legged race and most spectacular of all, the slow bicycle race.
My memory of such events was that they were organised by a few men who seemed to know exactly what to do and how to manage the various events. I remember seeing a tug-o-war match at a sports one time and it seemed like the most rule-ridden process I had even seen. There were markers and posts and ribbons, not to mention the giant rope itself. Instructions for taking the strain and a fair pull were given out with such gravitas that it seemed that any transgression of the rules would result in severe chastisement.
I loved those days. Competing and winning took me away from the competition of school where your value was based on being able to read and spell – I was poor at both and was frequently punished for ‘loosing’. But I could run like the wind and far from being shamed by adult teachers, I was praised by old men who once had been that small boy themselves.
In hindsight, I am not sure if such adulation for athletic ability is a good thing. We tend to see it as a defining mark of someone’s abilities while, in fact, it highlights just one aspect of an individual. It is interesting to note that in our ancient games, art, music and poetry were equally valued alongside physical strength and accuracy. At the 1924 Summer Olympics in Paris, Jack B Yeats' painting The Liffey Swim won a silver medal in the arts and culture section of those Games… and I believe the same artist was useless over 100 yards!
I was thrilled to see Cloonacool GAA club organise a good old fashioned Sports Day last year. It was the revival of an event that had been held in the parish in years gone by. This event, held in a field at the foot of the Ox Mountains, really captured the imagination. Children and their parents flocked to the spectacle from all over. And yes, there was wellie throwing and a married women’s race. Old men, who had competed on such days in the past, were there also, to see that things were properly organised and that fair play prevailed.
