Clodagh Finn: They called Maeve Kyle a disgrace to motherhood — then she became an Irish Olympic icon

Irish Examiner

7 days ago

Maeve Kyle, the multi-sport athlete and three-time Olympian who died on Wednesday, often told the story of the outrage that greeted her selection to compete in the Melbourne Olympics in 1956.
The sting of the condemnation in a particularly virulent letter to the editor in The Irish Times stayed with her. You can almost visualise the curled-lipped indignation of its writer as he (or perhaps she) spat these words on the page: 'A sports field is no place for a woman'. Sending a woman — and a married one at that — to represent Ireland at the Games was 'most unbecoming, unseemly and degrading of womenfolk. It must not be countenanced on any grounds.'
The letter was signed Vox Populi, a sign-off that was both arrogant and cowardly; here was a person willing to represent the voice of the people yet felt the need to hide behind a pen name, although that pseudonym was in regular use at the time.
It is also fair to say that the sentiment reflected a widespread belief that Maeve Kyle was indeed a 'disgrace to motherhood', as she described it later herself. Even her own parents-in-law were opposed to her jetting off to Melbourne, leaving her husband (and coach) Sean and their young daughter Shauna behind.
'They never congratulated me. They never asked me how I did and they lived next door. It was quite extraordinary,' she said in an expansive and beautiful interview with Eoin O'Callaghan published in this paper in 2016.
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And yet, you'll find evidence of early support for burgeoning female talent in places where you might not expect to find it. Who, for instance, would have imagined that Éamon de Valera, a man not known for championing women's sports, would be one of Maeve Kyle's early admirers?
After winning a race at Trinity College in Dublin in the early 1950s, she got a message to say de Valera would like to meet her. 'I was brought into the enclosure and there he was. 'A fine race you ran', he said. I was gobsmacked that he was even talking to me.
And then he said, 'Unusual for women' — I always remember that
Whatever the early reservations in the press and society at large, it wasn't long before Maeve Kyle's sporting prowess blasted them away. If you scroll back through the coverage of her athletics and hockey careers, the tone changes very quickly. By the early 1960s, the newspapers were already celebrating 'each illustrious chapter in her success story' with glee.
Maeve Kyle at home in Galgorm, Ballymena.
And what success. It is difficult to summarise the scale and sweep of her achievements. Here is a potted summary of the sporting life of Kilkenny-born Maeve Kyle who died this week at the age of 96.
She was our first track Olympian, representing Ireland in the 100m and 200m sprints in Melbourne in 1956, the year Ronnie Delany won gold in the 1500m. She competed in the Rome Olympics in 1960 and, in 1964, reached the semi-finals of both the 400m and 800m in Tokyo.
She went on to win bronze in the 400m at the 1966 European Indoor Championships in Dortmund, Germany.
In parallel, she chalked up an incredible 58 hockey caps for Ireland, and was named in the World All Star team in 1953 and 1959. She also competed in tennis, swimming, sailing and cricket. The tributes this week acknowledge her lasting legacy as a coach too. With her husband Sean, she set up the Ballymena & Antrim Athletics Club and she was involved in a fourth Olympic Games as coach to the Irish track and field team at Sydney 2000.
In a tribute, John T Glover, coach and 'athletics nut' as he calls himself, captured something of the fortitude needed to, first, compete as an athlete and, then, carve out a space for others to do so.
'Maeve was often referred to as the 'Kilkenny Kitten', a sobriquet which was only half appropriate. Maeve was no 'kitten' and there were few in the sport who did not experience the sharp tongue of Mrs Kyle. But it was through her effervescent enthusiasm, innovation and doggedness that women's athletics developed. Competitions like the Top Ten, Top Town, indoor Track and Field in gyms and sports halls and of course the Celtic International were all down to her.'
Recognition
Her incomparable talent and contribution were widely acknowledged in her lifetime, which is the right time for it; no point leaving the glory until after the person has left us.
There were a slew of awards. The one that comes to mind is the 2012 Irish Times/Sport Ireland Lifetime Achievement award because of its many Olympic echoes. It was presented by her teammate and friend, Ronnie Delany, who paid this tribute: 'She has achieved so many firsts, not forgetting the first Irish woman to set an indoor world record. Most of all she's a dear friend, and a pleasure and privilege to know.'
That was also the year boxer Katie Taylor won Olympic gold, but there was another reflection of Irish Games glory which passed under the radar at the time. On April 10, 2012, Tipperary-born Olympian fencer Dorothy 'Tommy' Dermody died. She was one of five women on the 83-member Irish team at the 1948 Summer Olympics in London, and she held the distinction of being Ireland's oldest living Olympian until she died age 102.
She was also Games Mistress at Alexandra College Dublin where she taught one Maeve Kyle.
(On an aside, she picked up the name 'Tommy' while travelling with her father, William, on his frequent trips away as a ship's captain. He was permitted just one female passenger — his wife Julia — so, in order to come along, Dorothy cut her hair and disguised herself as a boy called 'Tommy'. The name stuck).
Like her student, Dorothy Dermody was gifted in several sporting disciplines. She represented Ireland in diving, lacrosse and squash, accomplishments which Sean Kyle referenced to persuade his wife of two years to consider competing in her first Olympics.
You could say that was an early case of 'If you see it, you can be it', but what emerges from reading interviews with Maeve Kyle — thankfully, there are many — is that sport was innate to her.
She offered this evocative vignette to the Irish Examiner in the aforementioned interview: 'My first sports memories are playing handball in a covered alley against my two younger brothers — I used to beat them because they were slower than me. The handball gave me fantastic hand-eye coordination.
"I played touch rugby with the boys. I played hockey with the boys. I swam in the river with the boys. I was convinced I was a boy, too — living in a boy's school (her father CG Shankey was headmaster at Kilkenny College) with two brothers."
When, aged 13, she told her father that she'd like to compete in the school sports day, he said he had not planned to put on a girl's event, so she just ran against the boys — and won!
By then, she was a student at Alexandra College in Dublin and was living with her grandparents at the Provost's House, number 1 Grafton St, in Trinity College. Her grandfather, William Edward Thrift, was provost.
I hadn't known that before, nor that Maeve Kyle had briefly studied medicine at the college. She later switched to natural sciences partly because she fancied someone in the class, or so she joked at one point.
In an inglorious week when the focus has been on the Molly Malone statue on Suffolk St — and her poor, groped breasts — it would be the perfect time to honour this norm-shattering trailblazer at her former alma mater a stone's throw away.
The Eavan Boland Library, the first building on Trinity's campus to be named after a woman in 2024, could do with a teammate.