Eimear Ryan: It's special to watch sporting 'greybeards' in the twilight of their careers
Tj And Conor Reid Celebrate Kilkenny’s Fogarty
House of the Dragon, the less beloved but still entertaining prequel to Game of Thrones, returned to our screens last month. In the first episode’s opening scene, a Targaryen prince goes north to ask the Starks of Winterfell to supply him with soldiers for the imminent war. The young Stark lord says: ‘I have thousands of greybeards who’ve already seen too many winters. They are well-honed. They will fight hard.’ Increasingly, as I watch sport, it’s the greybeards that catch my attention – the seasoned performers on the cusp of retirement, hanging on for one more shot at glory.
We live in a culture that worships youth. Music, film, and even literature are obsessed with finding the next young thing. Sport, with its early retirement, forces its participants to grapple with their decline early, in a sort of strange rehearsal for old age. But sometimes – in the same way that a cherry tree’s last blooming is often its most spectacular – sportspeople save some of their best material till last.
Take the infectious joy of Thomas Barr, with his shock of pewter hair and buoyant energy, who is rarely seen on track without a smile on his face. At 31 he is, by any realworld measure, very much a young man, but in athletics years he is considered an elder statesman.
Last month’s 4x400m mixed relay gold medal performance at the European championships in Roma seemed to underscore this: here’s Rhasidat Adeleke, the future of Irish athletics, handing off the baton to a teammate ten years her senior. ‘Now, Thomas Barr, on paper, shouldn’t really live with some of these 400m runners,’ said the peerless Greg Allen on commentary, ‘but he is all heart, and he is all championship competitor.’ And that’s one gift that time and experience gives you – the ability to pull a performance out of the bag at exactly the right time, as Barr did, running the fastest relay split of his life and setting up Sharlene Mawdsley for victory.
While we’ll see the Waterford man compete at this summer’s Olympics in the 4x400m mixed relay, he faces a uneasy wait to see if he’ll be able to participate in his signature event, the 400m hurdles. He is currently ranked 42nd in the world, with 40 to qualify; he’ll need two athletes to decline their spots at the Olympics in the coming days in order to make it.
Despite winning the national title for the twelfth time last weekend, he confessed on social media: ‘A 12th title in front of a record breaking Irish crowd is something I’m very happy and proud of! But I took the first hurdle on the wrong leg which completely messed up my stride pattern today. It’s very unlikely I’ll qualify for Paris in the hurdles now. We need a miracle …’ This has always struck me about the starkness of individual sports, and track and field in particular. There is so much training, so much preparation, but the events themselves are quite fleeting. There is no chance of redemption after a mistake, only adaptation.
Even if, like Ronaldo, you approach your team sport as an individual, you still have teammates like Diogo Costa to intervene with their own brilliance and save your blushes. Not so with athletics.
Ronaldo is perhaps the exception that proves the rule. While it’s impressive that he’s still playing at elite levels at 39, he’s too much of a me fe iner to be an effective captain for Portugal. One can’t help but compare him to Croatia’s Luka Modric, another oldtimer at the Euros, who has continued to defy the received narratives about when it’s time to hang up your boots. In their most recent games, against Slovenia and Italy respectively, they followed similar trajectories. Just as Ronaldo missed a spot kick but then scored in the shootout, Modric missed a crucial penalty but scored a rebound minutes later to atone. Much of the reaction to Italy’s 98th minute equaliser focused on Modric ’s agonised expression in the dugout, just as the cameras lasered in on Ronaldo’s tears after his missed penalty against Slovenia.
But unlike Ronaldo, Modric has come in for nothing but love in the aftermath. Is it his playmaking and intelligence? His Owen Wilson-esque insouciance? The fact that he seems considerably more down-to-earth? All of the above, one suspects. An Italian journalist paid tribute to Modric in the press conference after Croatia were knocked out, saying: ‘I'd like to ask you to never retire from your playing career because you're one of the finest players that I've ever commentated on.’ This echoes the words of his Real Madrid manager, Carlo Ancelotti, who has said that Modric will need his permission to retire, before adding, somewhat threateningly, ‘I'll use him like a bar of soap until there’s nothing left of him.’
Stephen Cluxton is another player who has given every inch, but having returned fairly effortlessly from a two-year hiatus in 2023, one would never want to write him off entirely. A stalwart of both the Arnotts and AIG eras, if last weekend was the final time we saw Cluxton in a Dublin shirt, it was a fitting farewell. Always a stoic, never one to be lepping around in victory, he could often be found consoling opponents after the final whistle during his ten years of uninterrupted championship wins with Dublin. After Galway’s brilliant win last weekend, he still solemnly did the rounds – only congratulating opponents this time instead of commiserating. The epitome of that Bill Shankly quote about form and class.
This weekend, all eyes on are on the hurling semi-finals. Among the extraordinary young talent, two 36-year-olds will continue to slug it out for the mantle of all-time top scorer.
Not that it will even cross the minds of TJ Reid or Patrick Horgan: booking a place in the final will be their only concern. It feels special to be able to watch them empty the tank for their respective counties. Give me greybeards over greenhorns any day.