Cathal Dennehy: No, Olympians rarely get out what they put into Games

There are many phrases in the sporting lexicon that need to be abolished, banned, packed up and sent to the local incinerator and have their ashes scattered to the wind.

But after 17 days standing in mixed zones at the Paris Olympics, watching and listening as athletes of various types and nationalities came through in different shades of delight or distress, the one I’d pick first is this: You get out of it what you put into it.

That might be a good thing to tell a kid studying for an exam or at their first swim lesson. But don’t ever say that to an Olympian. Because it’s bollocks.

At this level, you do not remotely get out of it what you put into it. The truth is that over 10,000 athletes came to these Games, the vast majority angling their entire existence towards this for the last three years. And most will leave today disappointed. Most will walk away with nothing.

No medals. No prize money. No tangible, touchable reward for their toil other than the comfort of knowing they dared to take a punt on their talent and see it through to its natural end. To find out where it could bring them and to live with that knowledge instead of sitting on a barstool in their 40s and boring the arse of those beside them with tales of what they might have been.

Their lives were shaped and refined so they could be at their best in the last fortnight. And the reality is that only a minority actually were. Falling short is the norm here. No one lies in bed at night dreaming of finishing 12th in their heat in an OK-ish time or gets in the morning to put in the hard yards only to crash out in the round of 32. But for most, that’s reality. That’s the Olympics.

For every dream realised, a dozen more are shattered. This goes far beyond a zero-sum game. Success for a special few, by definition, means so many others must leave empty-handed.

That’s what they sign up for, and yet even when it happens – falling short – it still hits them like a tonne of bricks. There is shock, there is pain, there is the inability to express your anguish to some grizzled hack asking questions about it who couldn’t possibly know what exactly you’re feeling. Unless it’s David Gillick, of course. He knows. He’s felt it, and it’s why no one is better at counselling athletes through those initial, traumatic moments when things have gone awry.

Even the greats must deal with that, sooner or later. One of my abiding memories from these Games is seeing Femke Bol slap herself in the face several times after the women’s 400m hurdles final. Less than a week earlier, she’d been the queen of the track, splitting a sub-48-second leg to hoist the Dutch to mixed 4x400m gold. Now she felt like a villain, one who’d committed a crime against her own talent. She had tried – oh lord, how she had tried – to beat Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone, which was like trying to outrun a TGV across the French countryside. Failure was the only option.

In trying to win gold, she lost an almost certain silver, the second best athlete of all time in that event just third best. And so she slapped herself in frustration, then did the obligatory lap of the track with the Dutch flag. When she was almost finished it, she saw her boyfriend, Belgian pole vaulter Ben Broeders, in the stands. She walked over, clasped him, and sobbed into his arms.

On Friday night Karsten Warholm, the greatest male 400m hurdler of all time, had to come to terms with finally being deposed by his arch rival Rai Benjamin of USA. Warholm, like Bol, had gone for it and fallen short in the final. He got silver but for a man of his gifts, that was deemed by many a failure. He was asked whether his rival, Benjamin, who’d for so long lived in his shadow, deserved to win. Warholm agreed, but then added something interesting: “Everyone at this level puts in the work,” he said. “Everyone is doing what they can. But this is not charity.” 

It reminded me of a line that Tipperary hurling legend Lar Corbett wrote in his Sunday World column ahead of this year’s All-Ireland final. “As Mayo know, it’s never your turn. You never deserve it. The players have to make it happen on the pitch.” The Olympics abide by no laws of how hard you worked or how much you or your country needed or wanted it. You get what you get, not what you think you deserve.

You might think that after a fourth-place finish in the world final in Budapest, and after 12 more months of hard graft, that Rhasidat Adeleke deserved a medal in the 400m. And you might be right.

You might think that after all the heartbreak she’s endured at past Games, that the Olympic gods might let Ciara Mageean catch a break in Paris. Instead she was hit with the ultimate sucker punch, an inflamed achilles meaning she couldn’t even toe the line, She then had to sit and watch as Britain’s Georgia Bell – who Mageean beat at the Europeans this summer – won an Olympic medal.

You might look at Daina Moorehouse and think, yes, there is a boxer with immense talent and work ethic and discipline who’s put in the toil and produced a dominant performance, outclassing her opponent in the last-16. And then the judges don’t think that, for reasons we may or may never unearth, and her medal chance goes up in smoke.

You might look at Liam Jegou losing a silver in canoeing due to the tiniest error late in his run. Or Rory McIlroy going for gold and then, moments later, seeing his medal chance meet a watery grave. You might look at Robert Dickson and Seán Waddilove and wonder what it’s like to have an Olympic medal slip so tantalisingly out of your grasp. Or see the men’s Rugby Sevens dominate against New Zealand and Fiji only for tiny lapses in concentration to write a brand new chapter of Irish rugby trauma on the global stage.

Or you look at the tears of Phil Healy, Sophie Becker and Sharlene Mawdsley on Saturday, and that frustrated, vacant, thousand-yard stare of Adeleke alongside them, and know that for all its first-to-the-finish platitudes about fairness, there’s a whole lot about the Olympics that doesn’t feel just to those who fall ever so slightly short.

So no, they don’t get out of it what they put into it. They must sit and watch as others take the plaudits they worked just as hard for – the difference so often being an indefinable blend of talent and timing and fortune that allows some to flourish and leaves others to wonder what if.

It makes for fantastic television, and it’s a pity so many of these sports will now return to the shadows before they’re again deemed worthy of the nation’s attention. Because they shone so bright when they were given the stage. Medals or no medals, they’ve earned our everlasting respect.