The joys of the job

In the wake of Limerick’s Allianz Hurling League win over Clare on Saturday night, we were browsing Twitter and noticed an unusual tweet from Clare Echo journalist Páraic McMahon.

“Bizarre exchange as Brian Lohan refuses to do interview with me after Clare’s loss to Limerick this eve,”

“Oh you’ll come when we’re f***ing beaten alright. You can go away.’ (I was covering Newmarket Celtic’s FAI Junior Cup win rather than Clare v Westmeath last weekend)” he wrote.

Now, we’re not privy to what the prior relationship was between journalist and manager but obviously there was some class of history there.

As a journalist, you have to tread a fine line of trying to tell things in an objective fashion but not in such a way that it will raise the hackles of those you need to speak to on a regular basis.

Omertà

Over a decade and a half of covering sport, there have been times where I’ve been on the end of a blanket omertà, for whatever reason, and you just have to accept that and note the fact that you wanted to ask questions but answers were not forthcoming.

Once, a manager looked for a retraction after his team’s heavy-duty tactics were reported as such and then, when that or an apology were ruled out, he declared that the report just so happened to be “the worst I’ve read in 40 years”. Quite the coincidence.

On another occasion, a preview for a junior B final had to feature a prediction at the bottom. Having not seen either of the sides involved over the year, it was a 50-50 call but, as is often the case, it was the wrong one.

No big deal, I thought – the bookies get stuff wrong all the time.

The Monday after the final, though, a supporter of the team that had won felt it necessary to tweet me to say thanks for providing the team with the motivation necessary to win as “the preview was stuck to the dressing room wall”.

The easiest course of action was to say congratulations rather than pointing out the paradox that, according to his logic, if I had tipped his team to win, they seemingly would not have done so.

I’ll be honest, it’s not a great superpower, being able to bestow victory on the team to which you do not give the verdict.

There’s not long to wait until the beginning of the new Formula 1 season – and that means that there’s even less of a wait for the new series of Drive to Survive.

Now entering its fifth season, Netflix’s documentary has revolutionised the sport in terms of providing interest for those outside of the die-hard fanbase, making it broadly relevant again rather than just being seen as high-speed advertising.

Work commitments mean that I can never sit down to watch a race start to finish but, even if that were not the case, I probably wouldn’t. It feels like too much of a time commitment, compared to watching a highlights package.

However, whereas for a while our level of knowledge had dropped to knowing little more than the fact that Lewis Hamilton won every year, now it is on our radar again.

Unsurprisingly, the success of Drive to Survive has spawned copycats, but it’s hard to beat the original. One of the most caustic comments around Break Point, the tennis equivalent, was that the person would prefer to watch Point Break, the ridiculous early 1990s surfing heist movie featuring Patrick Swayze and Keanu Reeves.

This week sees the premiering of Full Swing, a documentary series centred on golf and those who play it at the highest level (though Drive and Putt to Survive would have been a better title, for my money).

Deadlines mean that I have haven’t had a chance to watch it yet, but one reviewer didn’t do much for the anticipation levels when he said, “By the end of episode one, this viewer at least would happily have shipped every single one of the golf pros and their camp followers off to Saudi Arabia, never to be heard of again.”

Extreme perhaps, but it just goes to show that a documentary series isn’t a magic bullet in and of itself – the subjects need to have stories to tell and the makers need to be able to draw them out.

Still, it doesn’t shake the idea that a GAA version would leave every other one in the ha’penny place.

The book I’m reading at the moment (well, one of them – I like to have a few on the go) is the Rodchenkov Affair.

It is written by Grigory Rodchenkov, who was a key member in the state-sponsored doping programme in Russia but also the man who acted as the whistle-blower.

After the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Vladmir Putin awarded Rodchenkov the Order of Friendship but, just two years later, when the news of the doping scandal broke, the Russian president called him “a man with a scandalous reputation”.

Rodchenkov currently lives in exile in the United States, away from his wife and family, and of course Russian athletes at the 2018 Olympics had to compete under the ‘Russian Olympic Committee’ banner.

It feels almost quaint to think back to a time when doping problems were the only reason for Russia’s exclusion from the international sporting sphere.

Last week, Thomas Byrne TD – the Minister of State for Sport and Physical Education, attended a virtual summit of sports ministers from across Europe, North America and Asia.

The meeting was addressed by Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy and the main topic was to discuss a co-ordinated international response to the stated intention of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to explore the development of a pathway for the renewed participation of Russian and Belarusian athletes.

The IOC’s unifying principle is that no athletes should be punished just because of their passport but there was a consensus that, at the present time, those athletes could not be re-admitted to the fold, even if they were participating under a neutral banner.

It is a shame for those elite practitioners in their field that they are prevented from competing through no fault of their own, and it just illustrates how far-reaching the ramifications of a senseless war can be.