New podcast celebrating the GAA's Olympic links features two Mayo legends
Lords of the Rings: the GAA’s Olympic Story is a new five-part podcast series that looks at the fascinating links between Gaelic games and the Olympics, featuring some of the many players who have won gold, silver and bronze while competing on the biggest stage in world sport.
Hosted by award-winning Sunday Times journalist and author Michael Foley and GAA journalist and historian Cian Murphy, they are joined by a panel of experts to look at some of the truly weird and wonderful aspects of the GAA link to the Olympics and recall some of the forgotten heroes who played hurling and football and became some of the greatest athletes in the world – including Martin Sheridan and Seán Lavin of Mayo.
This year marks a centenary of Team Ireland at the Olympics. That involvement was secured by Limerick’s J.J. Keane, arguably Ireland’s greatest ever sports administrator who successfully oversaw the GAA passing the baton of athletics administration to a new National Athletic and Cycling Association of Ireland in 1922.
A member of the GAA’s Central Council and an All-Ireland football winner with Dublin, Keane’s ally in the new Free State government in the promotion of sport was J.J. Walsh, a former Cork GAA chairman.
Representing Ireland in Paris in 1924 were footballers Larry Stanley and Seán Lavin. High jumper Stanley was an All-Ireland champion with Kildare and later Dublin, while Lavin was the man credited with inventing the solo run – now such an iconic part of the sport of Gaelic football – which he is said to have performed for the first time at Croke Park in 1923.
Lavin was also a brilliant handballer but switched to athletics after a wrist injury. He ran the 200m sprint in Paris 1924 and Amsterdam ‘28, and in later years was the team doctor.
One of the most successful Olympians ever born in Ireland was Martin Sheridan, a proud Mayo man who won nine Olympic titles for the USA. He was a staunch nationalist and GAA supporter, and was given a special reception by the GAA when he made a triumphant return to Ireland after winning his ninth medal at the 1908 Games.
RENOWNED
Long before 1924, however, the GAA link to athletic excellence was well established. Its first president, Maurice Davin was chosen in part because of his status as a renowned weight thrower.
Edmund Barrett of Ballyduff in Kerry won an All-Ireland senior hurling medal in 1901 representing London and was later part of the City of London police team that won gold in 1908 in the tug of war. He also won a bronze in wrestling, making him the sole holder of All-Ireland and Olympic gold medals.
Forced emigration brought many GAA athletes to Britain, the US and Canada, where they were able to successfully revive their careers. Others, like James Mitchell, were prominent players who were part of the GAA-sponsored US Invasion Tour of 1888 and opted not to return to Ireland, and would go on to land Olympic success.
John McGough was born in Ireland, raised in Scotland and worked as a physical fitness coach for Celtic and Manchester United. He ran the Olympic 1,500m race in 1906 and later trained the Cavan team that won the Sam Maguire at the Polo Grounds in New York in 1947.
Then there was the great Tom Kiely of Ballyneale in Tipperary, who was a Tipperary and Grangemockler footballer, sometime hurler and GAA Central Council representative who was also regarded as the greatest athlete in the world in his heyday. He was a gold medal winner as an all-rounder in 1904 in St. Louis. Resisting offers to officially represent Great Britain and the US, Kiely declared himself to be representing Tipperary and Ireland.
On the first eight occasions that the hammer event was staged in the Olympics, there were seven first-place finishes for Irish-born athletes with GAA links, and the Gaelic games connection continued in Olympic history right up to the 2024 team with 1,500m medal hopeful, European champion and Portaferry camogie player Ciara Mageean.
Michael Foley previously produced popular podcasts for the GAA on the Croke Park Bloody Sunday centenary in The Bloodied Field in 2020 and last year with The Summer of 98. Olympic historians and authors Kevin McCarthy and Tom Hunt and cultural historian and author Siobhán Doyle and Irish Times athletics correspondent Ian O’Riordan shine a light on the great stories that illuminate the GAA and its Olympics link in this year of milestones.
Lords of the Rings: The GAA’s Olympics Story is a podcast available today from gaa.ie, Spotify and usual platforms, produced by Andrew Foley, Michael Foley and Niamh Boyle.