The Olympic Federation of Ireland will hold its AGM later today with the shock of the postponed Tokyo Games and the reaction of the Olympic movement high on the agenda.
The meeting will take place virtually as a result of Covid-19 restrictions.
John Coates, the IOC Vice President who is also Chair of the 2020 Coordination Commission said yesterday that the Games would take place starting next July 23rd regardless of Covid-19 and that their original theme of being the ‘Reconstruction Games’ will be central, just in a different context.
The original theme was to mark the rebuilding of Japan after the devastation of the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear accident that hit Fukushima in 2011.
Now the prefecture will share the theme of rebuilding with the wider world.
That is a well-timed context for today’s AGM delivering a greater degree of certainty and confidence about the work that has gone in and will continue into the next ten months.
Slightly less well-timed is the parallel interviews and discussion taking place around the potential of Olympic Federation President Sarah Keane as a new CEO at the Football Association of Ireland.
She already holds this role at the same time as being the long-standing and much heralded CEO of Swim Ireland and technically it would be possible to hold both roles still but the FAI position would be something of a monster and that will be a factor.
It may well be that the FAI position ends up in other hands but at a critical time in the process, it might have been better for this AGM to be a few weeks later.
Still, that’s the thing about leadership. You have to react to the circumstances in which you find yourself and not everything can be planned.
One of the key moments of the firestorm that surrounded the old Olympic Council post-Rio and the arrest of former President Pat Hickey was Keane’s honesty in addressing all the issues, including her own role as a Board member in the two years preceding that period.
She might be best served to address the issue of the FAI at the outset today, even if only to say that she is aware of speculation surrounding the position but that today is for Olympic matters at an organisational rather than a personal level, and make no further comment until the time is right, if the speculation does prove to be based on fact.
