A bit like the birth of Christ determines how we measure years, you can basically demarcate Ireland at the Olympic Games into how things were before the Institute of Irish Sport came along and since it came along.
In the five Olympics prior to the foundation of the Institute in 2006, Ireland won only a combined seven medals, three if you leave aside the exceptional case of Michelle de Bruin.
In the five Olympics since the Institute was founded, the country has won 21 – and counting. One more than was accumulated over all previous 18 Olympics combined.
There has been nothing accidental about such sustained success. It has been systematic. While all the Irish stars of these Olympics may be in tracksuits, behind them is an army of faceless heroes, many of them in suits. And heroes all the more for recognising that only the stars should be those in tracksuits, the men and women in that arena.
That wasn’t always the way. During and especially after more than one Olympics the limelight and headlines could be dominated by Pat Hickey, head of the old Olympic Council of Ireland. Now probably the most influential administrator in Irish Olympic sport is a chap by the name of Liam Harbison. Would you even know what he looked like? Would you even know the name?
Don’t worry. You’re in good company. When a popular sports website picked up on a personal blog he wrote to express how emotionally conflicted he felt following the epic 2017 All Ireland football final, they never made the link that the Dublin native married to a Mayo woman was the same Liam Harbison that had been appointed performance director of the Sport Ireland Institute less than a year earlier.
Harbison was succeeding Gary Keegan in that role and it’s not a coincidence that they remain the only two people to have filled it. After the calamity that was the Sydney Olympics, the state recognised a more strategic approach was needed to give Irish athletes a chance on the world stage. Ahead of Athens, it helped fund and create five performance director positions: one apiece for athletics, rowing, sailing, boxing and Paralympics Ireland. Keegan landed the boxing gig; Harbison, previously a volunteer coach, the one with Paralympics.
When the Institute was founded halfway through the Beijing cycle, no one embraced its support services as readily as Harbison and Keegan: psychology, S&C, nutrition, performance analysis, they ate it up, and it showed. All three of Ireland’s medals at that Olympics were won by boxers. At the Paralympics, Ireland captured five medals, three gold.
London was even better; on Monday in these pages Brendan O’Brien noted that only this past week’s performance in Paris has approximated the brilliance of the 16 medals the Irish Paralympics team won in 2012.
And yet Harbison’s main memory of those Games wasn’t of of those medals. It was of going to see John Fulham, a veteran of multiple previous Games, in his opening heat, just in case something happened. Something did. As in things just didn’t happen for Fulham.
“I saw John coming through the mixed zone,” Harbison would recount to me in 2019. “And both he and I knew that was his last ever race when no one else there did. And we took a bit of a stroll under the stand and went into this room. And we must have sat there for two hours, just him speaking about his career and what it meant to him and how he had seen para sport come on from his first games in Barcelona.
“It was an athlete just having an emotional release. But for me the thing about it was, ‘What if I hadn’t been there?’ Because there was nobody else there. It brought home to me just how privileged the access we have to some of the really key moments in athletes’ lives and the importance of making sure we manage their exit.”
Ahead of those games they asked every athlete if there was anyone they particularly did or didn’t want to room with in London so no-one’s snoring affected them the night before their event. He had four bereavement scenarios in place to help alleviate the stress on several athletes trying to cope with both the biggest competition of their lives and the fact they had loved ones who were unwell and in danger of passing away any day.
That athlete-centred approach became all the more pervasive after Rio. In the wake of a famous knock on a hotel room door, Pat Hickey and the old OCI had to move on, replaced by the OFI (Olympic Federation of Ireland), presided over by Sarah Keane. Soon it established a partnership agreement with Harbison and the Institute, now known as the Sport Ireland Institute. The Olympics would be no one’s fiefdom, only the athletes’.
“I think after what happened in Rio, there was definitely a desire amongst the people working in Irish at a high-performance level for a change and to grasp a chance to properly align the system,” Harbison explained to me in 2019. “That there wouldn’t be territorial disputes. In no way am I denigrating the contribution people made but there were often certain barriers and constraints.”
The way it used to work was this: the Institute, with the backing of the various national governing bodies, would provide expert support for athletes – medical, nutrition, sport psych, whatever – for all but five or six weeks of a four-year Olympic cycle, only for all those service providers to make way for personnel the OCI had selected as their people to work at the Games.
In many cases the OCI personnel, though undoubtedly professional, wouldn’t have prior rapport with the athlete. On the eve of the most critical event in the career of an athlete, new relationships would have to be forged, established ones unnecessarily parked.
“There was a disconnect in the system,” Harbison noted. “And I don’t see how it aided athlete performance. What an athlete wants at the critical time in their career is a support team around them that they know and trust. That’s a very important relationship. Traditionally that wasn’t [prioritised] in the Irish Olympic team. Now there’s that continuity of care.”
What the Institute before and since Harbison has also brought is a sense of collaboration and synergy. It was evident the day we visited Harbison in Abbotstown. An area that once squeezed in both a gym and a physio clinic was now a plush open kitchen space that extended into a lobby with multi-coloured chairs and coffee tables.
Like everything else that went on in there, some thought went into that.
“We call it a social ecology space,” explained Harbison, quickly adding that the idea was not his but that of his “visionary” predecessor and colleagues.
“What Gary [Keegan] and [performance services director] Phil [Moore] were trying to create was a hub for the high-performance community – athletes, coaches, service providers, performance directors, CEOs – where you could have a cross-sharing of knowledge and expertise.”
Harbison joked that the busiest machine on the entire campus had to be the java coffee machine in the kitchen. An athlete could now have a cuppa with their coach and mingle with other high performers before moving to the medical area, gradually working their way down to the training zone.
“It makes for a pleasant environment. I’ve been in similar campus-type arrangements in other parts of the world and they’re generally soulless, heartless places. This isn’t.”
Outside that campus, hardly anyone knows who Moore or Harbison are. Just like they wouldn’t know Paul McDermott in the Sports Council.
But they and their predecessors are heroes of these Games too.
Again, this success isn’t an accident. It has happened by design. By serious graft and serious reflection, not just in the gym or the arena but in the office. By people behind a laptop, appreciative of the wonders of a java coffee machine.