The Pitch: Team Ireland set to deliver golden return on investment

In an interview with The Pitch, Federation CEO Peter Sherrard revealed that the organisation has now seen a record €6.1m in income achieved, an enormous leap since the last ‘normal Olympics’ - pre-Covid – when €2.4m was generated through sponsors.

Of course Rio was anything but normal given the controversy surrounding the then Olympic Council of Ireland, with arrests, allegations of ticket touting, money laundering and tax evasion – charges which have been dropped or have never been proven by Brazilian authorities.

Such impressive commercial gains have allowed a more than three-fold investment in the team itself, a largest ever Irish representation at an Olympics running to 133 athletes and a total of 300, including coaching and backroom staff.

The Olympic Federation’s €4.3m investment for Paris sits alongside discretionary funding of €2.4m on top of Sport Ireland and other public funding of €2.8m.

While the public money figure does not include the vast amounts invested from SI’s High Performance budget - €25m this year alone - it represents the biggest funding achieved for an Irish Olympic team, achieving a strategy where Ireland is starting to think and behave like a bigger nation.

And while the public money investment is up from €1.8m eight years ago, the reliance on the taxpayer is reducing significantly on a percentage basis, representing just a quarter of investment now needed in readying a team for the biggest multi-sports event on the planet.

“The sponsorship has really been the differentiating factor in terms of how we’re able to deliver more to the system which has gone from €2.4m, up to €6.1m for the Paris cycle,” Sherrard told Examiner Sport.

“From our point of view, it’s very good value, we’re contributing a lot back into the system that wasn’t there before and we’re increasing the levels of preparation commitment that we’re providing to athletes.”

This €6m is provided through key activations by PTSB as title sponsor, along with Allianz, Deloitte, Flogas and Key Patents Innovations.

McKeever Sports is another key sponsor as the official kit provider to Team Ireland, a move which Sherrard said was important to feature an Irish sports apparel partner brand.

The 133 qualified competitors who will represent the team are backed up by seven in reserve, and an extra 160-strong team of support staff, sports science, medical, physios, nutritionists, psychologists and analysts, across 14 sports in which Ireland will compete.

Expectations are high around these games and while Sherrard doesn’t want to speculate or put pressure on individual sports or participants, you can expect Equestrian, Boxing, Rowing, Rugby Sevens and Golf to show strongly.

Athletics may produce the standout moment for Ireland if Rhasidat Adeleke finishes in a forecasted position of first to sixth in the 400 metres, with the hope being it will be within a medal winning position.

If Adeleke wins gold, the runner will join a pioneering group of newly minted track and field winners who will receive a first ever bonus first prize of $50,000 for each gold medallist.

This prize purse was introduced by World Athletics who created considerable tension with the International Olympic Committee (IOC) ahead of the Paris games.

There are some who questioned whether prize money broke with the ancient spirit of the Olympics where athletes competed for medals only, and for the honour of representing your country on the highest stage of all.

For Sherrard, it’s a balancing act, and he would be delighted if any Irish athletes picks up a winner’s cash prize - as for keeping with the spirit of Olympics, he doesn’t see a conflict.

“I don’t think so, actually, that is long gone and I do think the athletes who go to the games by in large they are not doing it for purely commercial reasons,” he explains.

“Some of them are wealthy athletes in their own right but the vast majority are doing it for that very pure ideal of really wanting to be the best in the world and the amounts of money they are able to generate in their preparations is generally small.”

It seems that the IOC’s issue is that international Olympic body would prefer to redistribute any money back to international federations through a more equitable system, through solidarity programmes and other means.

“The IOC is very conscious of the universality of the games, but I’d be delighted if one our athletes wins a gold and is able to access that money,” says Sherrard. “Ultimately the IOC has a bigger picture in terms of what it has to manage to provide various mechanisms to a wide variety of sports.

“And sometimes those sports may not have the commercial nous that some of the bigger sports, like athletics, might have.”

Peter Sherrard has vast amounts of experience running international teams at major sports events, this being his second summer games, on top of two Euros competitions with the Republic of Ireland, when in 2012 he was the communications director and in 2016 as operations director at the FAI.

One commonality which spreads across these events - with the exception of the Covid games of Tokyo – is a demand for tickets, particularly for friends and family of those wishing to attend.

Paris is no different, particularly due to its close proximity where already the levels of support are trending exceptionally.

Irish people have bought up to 70,000 tickets for the various events at the Paris Olympics and the Federation has invested a significant sum in securing its own tickets for athletes families in the process.

“The (ticketing) model has changed quite significantly this cycle – it used to be you had a country-by-country distribution system, it’s been changed to a single worldwide system,” Sherrard explains.

This more open approach, he says, “brings a greater level of transparency and is very straight forward for people to access”.

“We’ve invested over €100,000 of our own resources into providing tickets for athletes and athlete’s families, but it’s still not a perfect science because there are big disparities in cost across different events, and you don’t always get what you ask for,” he adds.

The added complexity is getting tickets for later rounds of competition, making for another interesting challenge, one which is considered through how athletes have been tracking prior to Paris, “but by in large we have managed to get most of it right”.

“You’re trying to take the pressure away from the athletes and not having them fiddling around trying to get tickets on the day before competition.”

Excitement is building ahead of Friday’s opening ceremony, and only last week Shane Lowry popped by Olympic Federation’s HQ in Abbotstown to pick up his gear, ahead of joining Rory McIlroy, Leona Maguire and Stephanie Meadow at Le Golf National.

This year has added importance for Team Ireland with the Federation celebrating the 100th anniversary of Ireland’s first appearance at an Olympics, also in Paris in 1924, where Jack B Yeats won a silver medal in the arts, for his Liffey Swim painting.

There’s a lot of water to go under the bridge before formal centenary celebrations take place in Dublin in November, by which time Peter Sherrard will be better placed to know if increased spending equals more medals.

There’s never been a greater number of Irish competitors at an Olympics, nor has there been greater resources pumped into supporting those representing Ireland and Northern Ireland on the greatest stage of all.

With such a sound financial strategy and business model in place, it’s now up to athletes themselves, where hopes have never been higher for a greater return of investment.