Gary Keegan

Thanks, Joe.

Thanks for having me.

I think I like the horse whisperer one.

That's a nice one.

Yeah, I'm not a psychologist.

I would consider myself a high performance expert.

So I've been in the field for nearly 25 years.

I've seen most of what could be seen in terms of individual sports and team sports.

So I've built up a lot of experience over that 25 year period.

Yeah, I think you've described it well in terms of I think our Olympic programs, our Olympic sports were falling off the Olympic map.

We weren't

achieving any consistency around kind of world-class performance, whether it be Europeans, world championships or Olympics.

And the Paralympic side as well was also in consideration at that time.

So the Sydney Review had identified that the rest of the world had moved on, had professionalized their systems and had performance directors, coaches, science and medicine staff with facilities, et cetera, around their top athletes.

And Ireland were doing nothing, so we were well behind everybody else.

Some of these systems were up and running a decade and a half before we arrived to the scene.

So they chose four sports, and you're correct, Joe, boxing was one of those sports.

And I think boxing may have been selected because it had a record for the most Olympic medals at that time, but that...

history of medals had gone right back to 92 and then the flow of medals had pretty much stopped after that and with no consistency in medals you know the success was never systemic so we got a chance to

get some investment to put together a high performance unit and then a high performance program for Irish boxing.