Now that the O'Donovan brothers' success has been successfully mined by Official Ireland, they are left to pick up the tab.
Kieran McCarthy of The Southern Star reports that Ireland's only Olympic rowing medalists have to "beg, borrow and steal" a boat to compete at a World Rowing Cup from June 21st-24th.
The World Rowing Cup takes place across three separate events over the next six weeks. The first event is in Belgrade this weekend, followed by a meet in Linz, Austria from June 21st-24th before culminating in Lucerne in mid-July. Ireland are sending teams to compete in Belgrade and Lucerne, but not to Linz.
Not competing in Linz deals great damage to Irish chances of success at the World Cup, which will be won by the crew that combines the best set of results across the three events. It also affects preparation for the 2018 European and World Championships (in August and September, respectively), while Linz hosts the World Championships next year.
The reason Ireland are not sending a team owes to a funding shortfall.
In spite of the sport's sparkling success over the last two years, government funding has not increased. This is in spite of the fact that the size of the Irish team has swelled, which means that money is actually tighter than before. This has been exacerbated by a failure to attract sponsorship.
Gary and Paul O'Donovan, however, are intent on competing at the second World Cup event in Linz, and are willing to pay their own way there. Paul told the Southern Star of their plans:
Myself and Paul are still hoping to go, someway or another borrowing boats, it’s a beg, borrow or steal kind of thing to get there because we feel it would be hugely beneficial to compete in that World Cup event.
We’ll try and go somehow, we are working on the logistics at the moment and we’ll try to get there somehow.
Michelle Carpenter, CEO of Rowing Ireland, told the paper that Sport Ireland are not in a position to offer more funding:
We get money from Sport Ireland every year – and our 2018 funding is the same as it was in 2017. But we have more athletes now.
Sport Ireland would love to give us more money but their funding hasn’t been increased either. Sport Ireland have been great in supporting us, to be fair.
Attracting more sponsorship is key ahead of Tokyo 2020.
The full piece is on the Southern Star website.
