'We let our nation down' - Paris pain fuelling Irish equestrian Olympic ambitions

RTÉ News​

3 days ago

Barely a day goes by without Michael Blake casting his mind back to the Olympic Games in Paris and what might have been.
Horse Sport Ireland's high performance show jumping director led a fancied Irish team to the French capital – or to the resplendent Chateau de Versailles to be more precise – with serious ambitions of a podium place.
"We were talked up a lot more than we talked ourselves up. We knew we were there or thereabouts," he tells RTÉ Sport.
Results all season backed up such talk.
An unprecedented season of success produced 11 Nations Cup podium results, including a couple of five-star triumphs in Florida and Aachen.
Shane Sweetnam, Daniel Coyle and Cian O'Connor comfortably qualified for the final, a testing 1.65m course over 525m, with expectation surpassing hope in landing a historic first team show jumping medal.
Despite a second stunning clear round by Coyle and his 14-year-old mare Legacy, Ireland finished seventh after a tally of 14 penalties.
Nearly a year on, Blake is still processing the result.
"We knew things that needed to go our way," he says. "They did right until the last horse was going in. We were in line for silver medal, which was going to be fantastic. And it just didn't go our way.
"We're bitterly disappointed that we let our nation down. There was great expectation and we had great expectations. If you look at the countries that won the medals, they hadn't had any luck look before or since."
"We wanted to do our best and we've bounced back before. We've bounced back now."
Blake's confidence stems from victory in two Nations Cups in two different continents within five days, along with a five-star cup in Abu Dhabi
Earlier this month Ireland emerged as winners of the five-star Nations Cup of France in La Baule, just the third time an Irish team has succeeded in the prestigious event.
Blake mixed youth and experience - Bertram Allen, Seamus Hughes Kennedy, Tom Wachman and Cian O'Connor – a policy that he has implemented since assuming his role in 2012.
"If you look at all the wins, there's no common person on any of the three teams," he says. "I started in 2012 and I looked at our bases and it was like a cone going backwards.
"I've created a monster. People say, 'oh well, you didn't win the last Europeans'. But we were second and we were second with kids. I chose not to bring the A team, I suppose, for want of a better word, because I wanted to see what the emerging talent could do.
"The big win in La Baule, I had two kids on it with two young horses. It's not winning that makes me most proud."
Blake's approach may have caught some by surprise, but the strength-in-depth of the Irish squad is there for all to see.
The Clare native says it was about making clear to everyone the long-term vision; only selecting the best riders would not serve the team well down the line.
"I inherited the situation where there was a hierarchy. And the first thing to do was to tear it down. There was no resentment from the senior riders but I just saw things differently, that if we didn't keep adding to the talent pool that soon we were going to run out.
"And I see other countries have made that mistake, that have stuck with the same gene pool, all the time, and now there are countries like Sweden, Switzerland, are running into difficulty now, and they were powerhouses."
"Our senior riders, they mentor the younger riders. And it's great to see because we sit down at the beginning of the year, we try and make a plan for the whole year.
"As I tell everybody, you might be a brain surgeon some day, but you have to go to university and go through the steps. That's what I have tried to instil on people, that there is a progression, and that when you miss a step on that ladder, you usually come falling down."
It's a welcome headache for Blake to plot out team selections, but Dublin, Aachen, Rome and Barcelona are staging posts to the big prize.
Five-star wins in Canada and France have backed up the work behind the scenes, but Los Angeles in three years' time is focusing the mind.
"We hadn't won in Spruce Meadows (Canada) for 24 years, we targeted that. Now I need to target the elusive Olympics. I've been lucky enough, we've won the European championships, we've been second in the European championships.
"There's only the [Olympic] circles. That's what I'm after."