WINNING WOMEN

This August at the Beijing Olympic Games all eyes will be on Ireland’s track and field stars and on two fast young women, Derval O’Rourke and Joanne Cuddihy, who will be proudly waving the flag for Ireland. Irish women runners have led the sports field not just for women athletes but for men as well.

The legacy of our great international long distance runners, Sonia O’Sullivan and Catherina McKiernan, has inspired Derval and Joanne’s generation and ensured there is a strong pool of talent coming up behind the current Olympiads.

But women are not just involved in track and field and Ireland has a host of ‘winning women’ across all sports. That is not something we are always aware of as women are often written out of sports pages and broadcast programmes, which can seem exclusively the preserve of men and male achievement. The hidden heroines of sport inspired us, at Athena Media, to make an eight part TV documentary series about women and sports called ‘Winning Women’ and to tell the stories of young Irish women achieving at the highest level and reaching their goals and dreams. Young women like world champion boxer Katie Taylor, Winter Olympic skier Kirsty McGarry or junior champion golfer Stephanie Meadow. Women with drive, passion and ambition to make it to the top of their game and realise their personal best.

While hundreds of thousands of young girls play sport every day in Ireland the trend, according to recent research, is that most of them opt out of active sports around 15. For adult women sport can often be walking or light jogging, the gym or a swim rather than a full participatory sport. The stereotype is that women are not that interested in sports and consequently few TV or radio sporting programmes cater for women and most sports commentators and reporters are men focussing strongly on male sports teams or stars. Yet what the ESRI research also showed was that one of the keys to women playing more sports is for them to see female sports role models on TV and in their newspapers. It makes sense – women are likely to see themselves in sport if they see women achieving and making the grade in sports competition.

For us the motive was to tell those stories and to show just how much Irish women were already achieving across the sporting canvass. While runners like Joanne Cuddihy are well supported by the Irish Sports Council many of our sporting stars, like the Irish women’s rugby and cricket teams, struggle to gain sponsorship and adequate funding despite their high international achievements. Our Irish women’s rugby team has just had its best ever Six Nations competition and has already competed at World Cup standard despite the fact that few Irish school girls have access to rugby as a sport. Our cricket women have competed at five World Cups and our cricket champions twin sisters, Cecilia and Isobel Joyce, come from a cricket mad family with brother Ed Joyce playing for England in the recent World Cup. All our sports stars are young from 16 year old Co Antrim golfer Stephanie Meadow, who is now training in the US with Tiger Woods coach Hank Haney, to 22 year old skier Kirsty McGarry from Dalkey in Co Dublin. Kirsty is Ireland’s sole female skier at Olympic level and her older sister Tamzen competed at Olympic level before her. For her there is little Sports Council funding and her parents, Ian and Jane, struggle to keep all the finances in place to support her training in New Zealand and France. Jane, Kirsty’s Mum, makes the point that unless Ireland gets behind minority sports like skiing it will never change its performance in these fields at an international level.

WEBSITE DETAILS

For more information on ‘Winning Women’ check out

www.myspace.com/winningwomen1

Helen Shaw, Athena Media - Series producer of ‘Winning Women’

Read more about Winning Women in the June | July 2008 issue of WMB, on newsstands now.