Irish Olympian Paddy Barnes has voiced his displeasure with Rory McIlroy's reasoning for not travelling to Brazil for this summer's Olympic games.
McIlroy has been in the news several times in recent weeks for his views on the Olympics, even going as far as to say that golf doesn't matter at the event, but one of Ireland's medal hopes has taken exception with the way the golfer has conducted himself.
Barnes was talking to The42.ie after a week where he pulled a prank on his twitter followers by making him think that Paddy Power were suing him for copyright infringement, but are actually in fact sponsoring him for Olympics, and he claims that Rory's intitial statement were not his own words.
Rory McIlroy is one of those sports stars that when he makes a statement, it’s not really his own words.
It’s scripted so I’d probably blame his PR team for talking shite every few weeks. He’s had three different excuses already. It has to be his PR team making this up. It couldn’t be him. He couldn’t be that stupid to have three different excuses.
Barnes then rubbished the Zika virus excuse before concluding by suggesting that McIlroy should be watching the boxing this summer if he wants to watch the sports that matter.
Zika is in a lot of countries other than Brazil. Zika is in countries where golfers actually play Majors and where they holiday. I don’t see them pulling out of them. Zika is not an excuse. It’s actually very hard to catch.
I’d have more respect for him if he committed to the truth.
I heard he’s watching the sports that matter. He obviously understands himself that golf doesn’t matter. But he mustn’t watch Irish sport because [the] sports that matter he says are athletics and all the other sports. They’re not winning medals. He should be watching boxing. We’re more successful.
Shots fired.
We will certainly be watching the boxing this summer as we imagine the rest of the country will also, so we can't wait to see how Barnes and his teammates get on.
