About more than sport

How many of you can remember the names of any of the athletes involved in the Special Olympics?

Did you attend any of the events? Or did you merely watch some of the TV coverage, even if it was just a few minutes? And if you did either of these things, was it because you were genuinely interested, or because you felt you should?

It is instructive that more people have talked about the opening ceremony than anything else to do with the Games. And why not? At a time when the nation’s morale is not particularly high — soaring inflation, a general sense of a rip-off culture being endemic, dangerous streets, crap weather, the sense that we’re being led by a truly rotten government — the Special Olympics have come along, at a timely moment, to boost the national mood, by offering a demonstration that we can stage a major event without making a complete dog’s supper out of it.

However, there is undeniably a strong “Jim’ll Fix It” element to much of the Games. The sheer number of divisions in some of the sports — there are 40 sets of medals on offer in the 50m swimming freestyle, for instance — means that some of the athletes have more chance of getting a medal than not, which moves the focus of proceedings slightly away from sport and towards “one for everybody in the audience” territory.

Before you all start writing in, yes, I am aware that this is not remotely the point of the exercise. No-one but the most stone-hearted, prejudiced, witless trolls could see the Special Olympics as anything but an enormously worthwhile endeavour that hugely brightens the lives of those involved while simultaneously showcasing people with mental disabilities in a massively positive manner.

It’s just that I think we’d all have been better served if they’d dropped the “Biggest Sporting Event Held Anywhere This Year!!!” stuff.

I am aware this puts me perilously close to the position in the stocks currently occupied by Louis Walsh, who received an unmerciful pasting from the Sunday Independent over his recent tirade against the event’s organisers. Walsh could undoubtedly have chosen his words a little more carefully, but it’s important to remember that the only reason the Sunday Independent gave him the full enemy-of-the-people treatment because it was transparently seeking to overcompensate for a bilious column three years ago by one of its then “stars”, Mary Ellen Synon.

Synon described the Paralympics as “grotesque”, and went on to spew rubbish about swimmers finding their way from one end of a pool to the other by using braille, subsequent to which the Eastern Regional Health Board threatened to withdraw all of its lucrative advertising from the pages of the paper. Enough said.

RTE’s coverage, meanwhile, was less than impressive. During one of those interminable cavalcades of patronising interviews with the participants, the thought struck me that if this is genuinely a sporting event, then surely those involved should be treated as athletes by the media and questioned in a normal manner, rather than being smiled at and endlessly told how great they are.

Ultimately, everyone will have their own abiding memories of the week the Special Olympics came to Ireland. Personally, mine will be the Ukrainian table-tennis players who were kitted out in Clare hurling jerseys because their own attire had been mislaid.

There were large elements of the whole thing that you couldn’t honestly call sport, but in the grand scheme of things, I doubt that it really matters.