Ellen Coyne

And they felt that they didn't want to leave that up to the subjective preferences of the judges, where obviously this is an art form.

So it's not like a race when the winner is always necessarily clear.

Some of the judging can come down to personality.

And it's the strange thing about Irish dancing, because I went a lot into the history of it, is that even over 100 years ago, there were stories of people coming to blows at fetches because they believed that the rightful person had not been crowned.

Now, then it was a very masculine thing.

It was kind of like boxing, actually, where they were called bouts and the winner would wear a big belt like the belt that a boxer wears.

Whereas, so people have actually been fighting for Irish dancing as long as they've been doing it, I think.

But the cheating scandal in 2022 obviously brought that to like a more global scale where there was so much media intensity on this sport, probably more than it had ever experienced before.

It did.

Like, I mean, even in the 1970s, there was such a big, the popularity of Irish dancing in America was insane.

That's why they actually created the World Championships.

The first international person to win the World Championships was Michael Flatley, actually.

But yes, post-Riverdance, I suppose, it went into this new era where you would have had like Irish expats in Boston and New York who obviously would have kept Irish dancing alive forever.

But from the 90s on, you would have had parts of Asia where you wouldn't have a big Irish community where Irish dancing was being picked up by people who were the first person in their generation to ever do it.

So it's global.

It's probably one of our biggest cultural exports, I would say, as a country.

Yes.

And actually, what was interesting was in the years after Riverdance, girls started showing up to Irish dancing costumes with like the black tights and the beautiful velvet dress and like a slim back and as beautiful as Jean looked.

But because they weren't being marked up and because they didn't win, that was done away with very quickly.

And it went back to the big glam kind of like jeweled costumes that we're familiar with.