The Pitch: How Team Ireland pulled off brilliant transformation in Olympic fortunes

It will review ticket distribution, support awareness and a host of other KPIs, including sporting success, through one central and dominant heading: “What did we say we were going to do and did we do it?” 

What the OFI and Sport Ireland through its high performance committee said it would do before Paris was ‘win five to seven medals’, which CEO Peter Sherrard told The Pitch was “a tough target, but targets should be tough”.

The current four gold and three bronze already secured by Team Ireland means that target has been reached, in what has perhaps been the greatest achievement by an Irish international sports team.

The key findings to the McNeice report will reveal what elements worked well — or could be improved for LA 2028 — in the OFI’s groundbreaking Putting Athletes First strategy, a plan enacted during Sherrard’s relatively recent tenure.

Paris marks the former Ryanair and FAI executive’s first clean and complete Olympic cycle having been appointed to lead the deeply damaged Olympic Council of Ireland in 2018, coming in at what was the midway point before the covid-interrupted Tokyo Games.

Despite the legacy mess Sherrard inherited from Rio, and the operational and logistical challenge of Tokyo, Ireland secured four medals in 2021 — but the true examination of the Athletes First programme would only really be tested in Paris.

The plan was simple: Take all non-sporting pressure away from every single competitor through greater investment in resources, and the execution extremely complex.

Even ahead of Sunday’s closing ceremony, it’s not too early to say that the plan has been one of the most brilliant and transformative strategies in world sport.

The standard will now be as examined and analysed at home as it will be replicated and mimicked by other nations who want to think big through the OFI’s “no stone unturned philosophy”.

A key priority has been to allow Team Ireland behave like a major Olympic nation — Ireland sit in 12th spot on the medal table at the time of
writing, ahead of the likes of Jamaica, Brazil, and Spain and just behind Germany and Canada.

By removing all external challenges and uncertainties, the OFI has given participants free range to operate in a pure athletic environment, where every single need — and indeed the needs and support of their families — is catered for throughout the Games.

The programme doesn’t end when the athlete is finished in competition. Indeed a final phase of support is put into operation whereby they are transitioned out of the Olympic Village and into special elite performance decompression accommodation provided by the OFI.

This allows time for reflection and to come to terms with the range of emotions that will follow — whether they are extreme highs or crushing lows — before the journey home and back into a post-Olympic normality.

For the Athletes First initiative to work, the OFI more than trebled its investment compared to the last ‘normalised Olympics’ in Rio, thanks to an increased funding mechanism generated primarily through commercial and sponsorship fees.

There was also a heavy emphasis on strength in numbers, whereby the federation knew that to have a greater chance of podium success, it would have to bring more elite performers than ever before — 133 competitors and seven reserves.

With such a large number it was also vital that each participant had full access to all of their team including coaches, physios, S&C, nutritional, psych, and others, allowing for a 160-strong additional backroom staff to support Irish Olympians at the Games.

While this might seem like a basic need, in the past, some participants didn’t have direct access to their own training teams due to accreditation issues, another challenge which the OFI has managed through a highly complex series of movements.

As each athlete is finished in competition, support staff return their accreditations to the OFI, who in turn transfer those highly sought-after passes into incoming support staff, allowing every professional to be with their client in competition.

At the absolute heart of the Athletes First strategy is removing previous pressures that existed for athletes, through ticketing, commercial, and other operational necessities.

This was not always the case.

In Rio, a series of stories about athletes scrambling for tickets — and not always succeeding in getting them — competitors forced to use
public transport, and other challenges emerged, adding to the chaos brought on by arrests, investigations and ticketing controversies.

Before the Athletes First strategy could be enacted, the OFI needed to increase its Games expenditure — the amount of its own money that a national Olympic committee invests in an Olympic Games.

We reported recently that in 2016 this amount stood at €1.4m, a figure which was raised to €4.3m for 2024.

While the size of the team in Paris was almost double that of Rio — 133 v 77 — the OFI needed to increase individual investment in every athlete to insure its programme could be fully activated on the ground.

This amounted to an average national Olympic committee investment of €32,000 per athlete in Paris compared with just €18,000 in Rio.

It also allowed the OFI to increase its own resources and support staff at the Olympics, the vital steps in forming a ‘Putting Athletes First’ commission, “to ensure that being an Olympian is the pinnacle of their sporting career”.

“The work of the athletes’ commission is to ensure that athletes are empowered to participate in and advise on decision-making structures and have a voice on all key matters affecting Olympic athletes,” it declared in its strategic vision.

With ticketing, the OFI was the only country at this Games which invested its own money in buying up tickets for events featuring Irish athletes, spending an additional €100,000 on passes for loved ones who failed to secure admissions through the various pre-Games lotteries.

Team Ireland’s Games funding was also supported by discretionary Sports Ireland funding of €2.4m, with a further €2.8m in public funds, ensuring there is finally investment in the resources required for an exclusively elite performance environment.

And while the competitors prepared within the highest standard, entertainment has been laid on throughout Paris for Irish stakeholders and families through 18 nights of activities, organised by a corporate partner.

There are post-competition activities laid on for the athletes at the Irish Cultural Centre, where 40 guest rooms were prepared for that decompression period.

A number of artists in residence are on the ground at the Centre Culturel Irlandais, as well as entertainment and ongoing support for the athletes once their race is run.

How does the OFI’s own investment translate into a cost per medal compared with Rio?

Despite having almost double the amount of athletes in competition, albeit funded by more than three times the 2016 budget, the price per medal has reduced.

In Rio, Ireland’s two medals worked out at €700,000 apiece for the rowing and sailing slivers. In Paris, Ireland’s record haul currently costs just over €600,000 each.

So while there is far greater investment in the needs of athletes, that spend is having a clear reduction on the cost of podium success, establishing a financial value for what has been a priceless programme for Irish Olympians.