Feature Interview
7 November 2003
PJ NOLAN INTERVIEW: THE PRESIDENT'S ANGLE (Part 3) Click Here for Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3
SS:
You mentioned the Olympic manager. Will
there be a permanent national team director or does it suit better that it is a
floating position?
PJ:
No, it doesn’t suit better at all. I would have to say that it is a matter
of huge angst for us that we don’t have a permanent….not a national team
director, but what we need is to have somebody to manage the programme of
international competition. Like, if Peter Keen came along for the job I don’t
think we would accept him! What we need is somebody to put the programme
together. We would actually need to take a step back and say that while we are
results based, what we need to be is putting a process in place for this whole
thing. Again, it is resource based. I think it is imperative that we do so and I
would say that it is one of the things I will be fighting very hard for in the
next year, to get somebody in. Even from a logistical point of view we can be
much more efficient in how we do stuff, but we also need to have a database.
We are in the process now….Philip Collins will be making a presentation at the AGM to outline a ten year plan we are looking at for high performance. Again, that is one of the other things that has taken a lot of time this year, looking at it and developing it. It is more a case of human resources rather than cost, because the cost is not that high of putting a very comprehensive programme together. It has already been shown to the sports council, they have already looked at it and are examining it at the moment. Now whether we get all the goodies we want, or get any of them, I don’t know. Obviously we will lobby hard and try to get that. But, yes, a programme manager rather than a team director is important because it is the process rather than the individual that is crucial.
All I want to do in my term is leave a legacy of something that actually works, irrespective….we have to be personality proof rather than personality based. That is a huge issue. Stuart Hallam is pathological on this, that we have to have systems that work no matter what monkeys are pressing the buttons. That is really, really important. Because we are, to some extent…you can see, as Martin O’Loughlin says, under-delivering. A lot of it is last minute stuff, it is costing us money and we are making decisions that have been planned but not planned to the type of detail that a professional person my do them to.
We do have people doing fantastic jobs as it is….if you take the likes of Frank Campbell, he takes a week off for the Rás, he takes nearly two weeks off to go to the world championships. And the work himself and the other people were doing out there…it is just crazy, the amount of driving, getting people ready. We have a very, very….if anyone has been to the Irish pits lately at the world championships they will find that they are not let near them. They have a very strong ethic on how to do things, they have a system in place there. It is very interesting that myself and Jack Watson, who are on the official delegation, are totally divorced from the team. And we have made that the business because they are there to do a job and we are there to do another job.
Our job is great this year because Pat McQuaid is doing very well in the running for the presidency of the UCI, which is a highly exciting thing. It is brilliant news for cycling and it just goes to show…I mean, years ago the board took the decision that they were going to go to international meetings, get representation, and make sure that we had a presence at that level. And it has worked, paid huge dividends, because we are now recognised as players internationally. People might say ‘that is only the blazers having a waffle’ – it isn’t, because there are some big decisions that influence the future of cycling in Ireland, like the UCI resolution last year. I think Pat McQuaid would make a great president of the UCI, I would be very excited because he is very much a global man and has been around cycling, been a professional bike rider himself, been a race organiser and now been an administrator. He has the whole gamut of experience. He is also a very personable individual – anybody can talk to him. He is a very strong man too. I think cycling has proved recently that it is able to withstand challenges that other sports can’t.
SS: Speaking of people coming through on a big level, Mark Scanlon has had a very good first season as a pro. How do you see his career progressing?
PJ: Well, it is a bit like asking a donkey how he sees a race horse run. Mark is heading for the very top flight. He is a lovely lad and I think he has the character to be a good professional, as well as the ability. He had it tough since he won the junior worlds…he had an awful lot of pressure on himself – he has been world champion and then he was injured the year after that. Although he is still only a young guy, he has had a lot of expectation and he has managed to…he has incredible ability, he has managed to get through all that and now he has emerged at the far side as a very, very good professional. He is in the top 250 in the world now, and that is a phenomenal achievement. I think his results would have moved us from 40th to 33rd in the world. With regard to rankings, it is the only way we will ever move up is to have professionals in big races.
At the back of it all, despite the fact that we are talking about concepts and organisations, we are all cycling anoraks. We all love to see…’jeez, where did he finish today?’ I mean, we were all welded to the internet there during the Tour of Denmark, to see how Mark was getting on. Certainly in the world road championships this year, the last four laps of that were completely viscous yet Mark finished within 42 seconds of the winner, after a really, really hard race where there were big, big names giving up left, right and centre. He was there at the business end of things until the very end of the race, in his first ever elite world championships. That is very exciting…the thrill that gives you is just phenomenal.
SS: Without putting more pressure on Mark, is the type of career he looks set to have as important as everything else for the future of Irish cycling, in terms of publicity and in terms of role models for kids and all that?
PJ: Ahhh, absolutely. You see, they are complimentary roles. The role of Mark Scanlon is as somebody to aspire to, because the people who raced against him will say they raced against him, and the people who saw him will say they say him racing, or whatever. It is an exciting time because Mark could go to the very top, and hopefully Ciarán Power will have huge results next year as well. Those type of guys, to have people like that who are Irish and we are looking after them, it is such a big deal. The huge growth in cycling in the late eighties and early nineties was when Kelly and Roche were at the top. It is history repeating itself, I don’t think there is any limit to Mark Scanlon’s capabilities or the achievements he could get. He could end up at the very top of the pile. He deserves it because he has tried very hard and he is a very dedicated fellow. Hopefully now it will work out for him.
SS: To sum up, what is your overall feeling about the way things have progressed since you have taken over and the way things are going? What do you see as the main issues?
PJ: Well, that is not really for me to say how things have gone. I think….our membership is up about 20 percent in the past three years, the young lads’ membership is up too. There are ordinary things like the reintroduction of park racing which has been a huge success and hopefully that will increase next year. Commercially we are on a slightly stronger basis than we were…one of the things which was a huge plus has been the introduction of Hibernian and National Bike Week. Now I know it has still a long way to go but if you take the Coast to Coast last year, there was only sixty people on it whereas this year there was almost two hundred in it. That can be a huge plus for Irish cycling. There was a school run in Dunshaughlin during National Bike Week that our club organised…there were 500 hundred kids at it. Those kinds of things give you a huge plus. And then you get a phone call from Phil Collins saying ‘by the way, Ray Clarke is after winning a bronze medal in the Olympic qualifiers this year in Switzerland’…that is great news to hear. Obviously, if the programmes weren’t in place, these guys wouldn’t be getting there.
One of the big pluses for me was two years ago when Ciarán McKenna phoned me to say that we had securing funding for Ciarán Power and Mark Scanlon after the Linda McCartney collapse. Now if the Sports Council hadn’t seen it fit to do that, even thought they were outside the criteria…the lads had been inside the criteria because of the team they were with, but then fell outside the criteria when it collapsed…but the Sports Council funded them and have been funding them since. That meant that instead of going to work in factories, those guys are now top-class professionals. That type of thing is exciting.
I mean there is other stuff that is a bit unseen. The fact that there are nineteen level one coaches accredited this year, through Micheal Concannon, Padraig Marrey and all the tutors’ work. That type of basic stuff is ongoing, and has to be. All I am is the fellow who is here for this little while, but is important that whoever comes along after me has something to work on and has a system in place that they are not left to pick up the pieces. There was a number of years there when things were going down and it takes a while to change the trend on things. That trend is not because people weren’t doing their jobs on the Boards, it could have been economically or whatever. It would be very arrogant of me to say that things are an awful lot better since I took over. I think an awful lot of people have done mad loads of work since I have been in this job and it is all credit to them. All I am is the guy who has been actually given this post for this number of years.
We have moved on, we have other big plans which will hopefully come to fruition in the next year or two years. We spent a lot of time on the whole idea of a velodrome over the past couple of years, and that is not completely gone away either, you know.
SS: You think there is still hope of that?
PJ: Oh yeah, we never stopped working on that. The people in Kerry now have secured a site and they are working on that whole issue. That is very exciting, the work that Paddy Callaghan has been doing down in Killorglin….