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A recent Vatican News report that the Pope sent a delegation of his most elite athletes to Gibraltar to win gold in the Championships of the Small States of Europe is a canary in several interesting mines. Deus vult to each of the five Vatican athletes—Emiliano Morbidelli, Carlo Pellegrini, Rien Schuurhuis, Giuseppe Tetto, and Giuseppe Zapparata— competing for the Vatican and likewise to those who represent Albania, Andorra, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Cyprus, Georgia, Gibraltar, Iceland, Kosovo, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, North Macedonia, Malta, Moldova, Monaco, Montenegro, and San Marino.

Because not all countries have previously won medals at the Olympics, which NATO sponsorship makes a very lop-sided affair, hopefully those games in windy Gibraltar will inspire children in all the competing nations to try, as the Olympics’ motto has it, to be faster, higher, stronger.

Although my own pip squeak nation of Ireland now feels itself too grand to compete in such championships, that is OK as, even though I was too young to remember it, Saturday, 1 December1956 in Melbourne was the pinnacle of the modern Olympics for me and mine. That is because it was then that Ireland’s Ronnie Delany won gold in the flagship 1500 metres event. Although Wikipedia tells us that Ireland has won 11 gold medals in the last 100 years, for me, that is the standout event.

That is because Delaney became a byword for excellence in our otherwise barren landscape. Because Ireland’s next gold was in Barcelona in 1992, Delany had to carry our hopes through all those very dry years.

Although I never knew Delany, I was quite chummy with his pal, John Joe Barry, the Ballincurry Hare, who gives a wonderful interview to Clonmel Radio you should listen to here. Barry, who married and divorced a string of Hollywood starlets, was the George Best of his time and might well have beaten Roger Bannister to being the first to break the four minute mile, had this lovable rogue not been such a self-destructive rake.

Athletics has been back in the news in Ireland, as the usual suspects, who have no interest in track and field, are lying that their political opponents are complaining that Nigerians and Eritreans are now representing Ireland. One of the things that is odd about that squabble is why, given that field and track is a minority sport, the debate is taking place at all.

The only good thing about Ireland, or any other country, winning Olympic field and track medals is it might inspire younger children to take up the sport. Think Belarus’ Olga Korbut, Russia’s Kamila Valieva or Romania’s Nadia Kamănchi to get my drift.

All three bring us back to the Pope’s athletes in Gibraltar. What, besides a bit of low level networking, would the Vatican hope to achieve there against a range of countries, who can be rightly very proud of their own sporting achievements?

As far as Ireland goes, the Catholic Church has a mixed relationship with sport. Although Croke Park and MacHale Park are called after two of our greatest ever patriotic archbishops and although priests and religious brothers have often been, as the Salesians have been world wide, at the heart of local sports’ clubs, you can’t really have clerics in the field of play or, to be more accurate regarding Irish games, in the line of fire. You can’t, in other words, take the head off a priest with a hurley stick and expect him to forgive you your sins the next day in Confession.

The point here is that, though games might help develop character in accordance with Church teaching or, if you like, along the lines Pierre de Courbertin, the founder of the modern Olympics, envisaged, modern sports needs a practical structure to make them a living, breathing, concrete reality. And, whoever controls that structure by and large controls the rules of play.

Because that structure has derived from the British and French military, from shady business and from the exploitable adulation of malleable crowds, it has always contained within itself the seeds of its own destruction.

The British and French military codified many of our modern games. Fox hunting, for example, was a gentleman’s gate-keeping game where upwardly mobile officers could mix and marry into the landed gentry. Much the same goes for polo, which the British discovered in the North West frontier and brought back to Albion, to divorce their officer class from the hoi polio, who could not afford the horses, saddles, polo sticks and expensive brand goods that are part and parcel of that emasculated game.

For the rank and file, there was boxing and football, soccer in the mainstream and the British armed forces helped spread them and other sports like cricket, rugby and hockey, as British models of manliness and efficiency, throughout their empire.

The equestrian sports, which still predominate in the British Royal family, acted as a social gatekeeper and the popularity of the more vulgar sports kept the great unwashed happy, in accordance with the bread and circuses mantra of the ancient Romans. They all helped reinforce the British social structure up to the swinging sixties.

Although sport was a great common denominator and morale booster to the troops during The Great War, the 1920s showed a return to the old class divisions, which lasted until the rise of the Waffen SS, where Felix Steiner emphasised communal sports with no regard to rank to build camaraderie in the face of overwhelming odds. Steiner brought the playing fields of Eton logic of the British Empire to its logical conclusion. If you were up against the Waffen SS, you were up against some serious opposition, who played, if not to win, then to stop you winning at any cost.

Post war witnessed the rise of consumerism, which was as much a poisoned chalice to Barry, as it was to Best, Gazza and Maradona, all of whom emerged from boisterous, working class milieus. Athletes like Delany, who knuckled down, reached their own personal pinnacles.

As did Eamonn Coughlan, another Villanova scholarship boy, who was pipped for medals in the 1976 Montreal and 1980 Moscow Olympics. What I still particularly remember about his 1976 performance is how, in a subsequent interview, he said some Irish bum came up to him afterwards, complaining the bum had lost a ton of money because Coughlan “only” came fourth.

But Coughlan, at least, was allowed to compete, which is supposedly what it is all about in Gibraltar, Kazan and Paris. But NATO, like a petulant child in the schoolyard, don’t see it that way. Their ball, their rules.

Fair enough but, when the Paris Olympics comes around, I will be cheering for Africans representing African countries, who follow in the giant strides of John Joe Barry and Ronnie Delany. I am thinking of some Nigerian female boxer in the last Olympics, who knocked out the first two seeds, but who was eventually out-pointed due to her lack of technique, and of some Rwandan dude, who trained for the cycling events on a bicycle held together by little more than sticky tape and pieces of twine.

And, though I also wish bonne chance to all those athletes competing in Paris for the Small States of Europe, they should remember that they are but bit players in a NATO funded charade Macron, Zelensky and Sloppy Pants Biden have degraded beyond recovery or repair.