Summer Olympics 2021

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Philip Doyle: ‘I was on the phone begging for a job’ – Rower back at work as a doctor

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Ronan Byrne and Philip Doyle
Doyle (right) and double sculls partner Ronan Byrne were hopeful of challenging for a medal at Tokyo 2020

When Philip Doyle agreed to put his medical career on hold in order to focus on his Olympic preparation, he did so with more than a touch of reluctance.

The Irish rower is happy to buck the trend of most Olympic hopefuls by openly admitting to rarely being consumed by his sporting discipline.

Doyle, 27, has never hidden the fact that medicine is his first love. One that will form the basis of his professional life once he is content with his rowing achievements.

In 2018 he walked away from rowing for a period because of the impact it was having on his career as a doctor, but the allure of Tokyo 2020 was just enough to bring him back under the agreement that medicine would resume centre stage by the end of the Olympic year.

Such plans have now been blighted by the coronavirus pandemic which has seen the Olympics postponed until 2021.

For Doyle, the cards have fallen in such a way that medicine is now, without question, the priority.

“I was only on the phone last week begging for a job,” said Doyle, who started work on the general medicine ward of Newry’s Daisy Hill Hospital last Wednesday.

“The medicine was there long before the rowing was ever in my life, it’s always been my main number one driving force.

“I think I was a bit begrudging in the beginning, having to give all of me to the rowing so this break allows me to finish off my foundation year.”

It is a change of pace in every aspect, with Doyle now back in his family home having spent much of his time training in Cork prior to the news of the Olympic postponement.

The utility room and the garage have been transformed into a “dirty room”, where Doyle can change his clothes and wash upon returning from a shift before stepping inside the house, in order to minimise the risk of spreading Covid-19.

‘I have to see through my Olympic ambition’

It is not even two weeks since the Olympic postponement was announced, and already life in training camp feels something of a distant memory.

It is not, however, a permanent state of affairs and even for Doyle, for whom circumstance has accelerated a long-held desire to prioritise his medical career, there is unfinished business that must be attended to.

“I have to see this through,” says Doyle, who secured Olympic qualification with double sculls partner Ronan Byrne at last year’s World Cup, in which they secured a silver medal.

“Myself and Ronan have put ourselves into a position where we can really fight for a medal.

Ronan Byrne and Philip Doyle secured silver for Ireland at the World Championships in Linz in September
Byrne and Doyle secured silver for Ireland at the World Championships in Linz last September

“I’ve said it to myself so many times that I’m a medal contender and I want to prove that right and prove that we can bring a medal back.

“When I first quit my job to qualify for the Olympics I was going for the T-shirt -for the experience.

“But once we started performing and producing results, all I want is an Olympic medal and to bring that home.

“So I have to see this one through first at least and then we’ll see about the next one.”

Britney Spears Claims To Have Shattered Usain Bolt’s 100-Meter World Record | Entertainment

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Move over, Usain Bolt. Britney Spears is the fastest human ever … according to herself.

The 38-year-old singer posted a since-deleted photo on Instagram of her phone timer on 5.97 seconds Wednesday with the caption “Ran my first 5!!!! Getting over your fear of pushing it in the beginning is key … once I did that I hit 5 !!!! Usually I run 6 or 7 … my first try was 9 … and now I did it whoop !!!!! 100 meter dash!”


Impressive, Britney. Except if she actually pulled this off she would’ve absolutely obliterated Usain Bolt’s 100-meter world record by more than 3.5 seconds. Her alleged attempts of six, seven and eight seconds also would’ve shattered the record Bolt set in 2009 at the IAAF World Championships in Berlin with a time of 9.58 seconds.

Nobody knows for certain what Spears did in 5.97 seconds, but less than 24 hours later she deleted the photo and said her impressive dash was a joke in a new post captioned “obviously I was joking about running the 100 meter dash in 5.97 seconds …. the world record is held by Usain Bolt which is 9.58 seconds …. but you better believe I’m coming for the world record!”

It seems self-quarantining is making all of us lose our minds.

Thumbnail photo via Kirby Lee/USA TODAY Sports Images

Olympics ‘gave each Londoner a £900 feelgood factor’ | Sport

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The rocketing cost of staging Olympic Games has made it too expensive for many cities to contemplate. In the bidding to host the 2024 Games, three out of the five bidders – Boston, Budapest and Hamburg – withdrew, largely on grounds of cost.

But new research suggests that, for London at least, hosting the 2012 games was worth the £9.3bn price tag, thanks to the temporary feelgood factor it bestowed on the capital’s residents and, to a lesser extent, on the rest of Britain.

Work by a team at the Centre for Economic Performance, based at the London School of Economics, suggests the average Londoner would have been prepared to pay almost £900 to host the games, such was the boost it gave their mental wellbeing.

The research suggests that the decision by the organisers of this year’s Tokyo Olympics to push the games back to next year, rather than cancel them altogether, may be justified, if it gives a similar fillip to the city and Japan as a whole.

The team reached its conclusion after studying the mental outlook of 26,000 residents living in three cities – London, Paris and Berlin – before, during and after the 2012 games.

The team found a significant increase in life satisfaction among Londoners over the course of summer 2012 which, after stripping out everything else, they attribute to the hosting of the games.

Christian Krekel, research fellow at the CEP, said there was evidence the feelgood factor extended beyond Britain.

“Although we find clear evidence that the subjective wellbeing effects are larger in the host city, there is also evidence for positive spillover effects to other countries,” Krekel said.

External factors such as the weather and political events were taken into account. The wellbeing of Londoners was found to change little as the medal count rose, suggesting the increase came from their pride in hosting the event rather than Britain’s sporting success.

The large volume of wellbeing data now available allows economists to put a price on a potential boost to someone’s positive outlook.

In the case of the 2012 games, the economists suggest that the increase in wellbeing was was worth up to £892 to the average Londoner – the equivalent of London paying £7.4bn to host the games. This was almost £2bn below the actual cost. But separate research suggests that people living outside the capital were also willing to pay – though a smaller amount than Londoners .

The researchers claim: “If UK residents outside of London had a willingness to pay that was, say, half that of Londoners, then a case could be made that hosting was actually worth the costs.”

The feelgood factor was, however, relatively short-lived. A year on and wellbeing levels in the capital were back to normal.

NFL analyst: We can only know so much if we weren’t in the huddle

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We’ve all done it. Well, not you, but the rest of us have.

We see a play go wrong for an NFL team, and we can see who screwed up. We diagnose the blown assignment or mental lapse and assign blame to the offending player.

And really, unless we were in the huddle, we have no idea if we’re right.

Seattle sports radio personality Danny O’Neil saw Seahawks lineman Justin Britt miss a block against the Vikings last week and tweeted about it.

He later realized he hadn’t known what he was talking about.

“I was absolutely, unequivocally, undeniably wrong,” ONeil wrote in an unusually frank bit of self-reflection on MyNorthwest.com headlined “When it comes to diagnosing an NFL play, observers have limitations.” It turns out, O’Neil wrote, that the unblocked defender wasn’t Britt’s assignment. Someone else was supposed to make that block and didn’t.

This is my 11th season of covering the Seahawks on a daily basis, and I am simply not capable nor qualified to give you a definitive explanation for why a specific play failed. Not only that, I’m suspicious of anyone else who claims expertise in that regard …

There is a whole corner of today’s NFL coverage that speaks with authority on exactly what occurred on a given play, which is undermined by one simple fact: No one outside the team’s coaches and players can say for certain either what a player is asked to do on a specific play or how he is asked to do it. It’s all guesswork. An analyst can say what they think happened, but they don’t know. Not unless a coach or player tells them, and if you’ve ever listened to an NFL coach’s press conference you probably have an idea of just how hard it is to extract information about who goofed up and why.

He makes a great point, and one any observer should keep in mind. We know what we can see. Beyond that, it very quickly gets into guesswork until we get the information we need to create informed analysis.

Tokyo 2020: Joe Clarke does not understand British Canoeing decision

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Joe Clarke waiting to compete in canoeing at Rio 2016
Joe Clarke won K1 slalom gold at Rio 2016

Joe Clarke “does not understand” British Canoeing’s decision after it confirmed the defending Olympic K1 slalom champion would remain out of the team for the postponed Tokyo Games.

Clarke missed out on the Olympics after finishing behind Bradley Forbes-Cryans at the World Championships.

“I really don’t understand it,” Clarke, 27, told BBC Sport.

“Obviously there was a policy in place beforehand to select those athletes, that was all done by the book, but when the Olympics were postponed to 2021 there was no policy in place to keep those athletes in those spots.

“With such a big delay, those athletes who missed out fully expected there to be a re-selection, but unfortunately they haven’t chosen to do that.”

The Tokyo Olympics will now begin on 23 July 2021.

In addition to being the defending champion, Clarke also finished second in the world rankings in 2019.

He has spoken to other athletes who were hoping for re-selection, and together they are “looking at what the next steps may be”.

Forbes-Cryans says it was “fantastic” to find out he would still be going to the Olympics, but felt the situation “could have been dealt with a bit more delicately”.

He added: “I understand it from my fellow competitors’ point of view.

“We are all highly competitive and want to be going to the Olympic Games but for me, a few people were trying to capitalise on these unfortunate events.”

Liam Heath will attempt to defend his K1 200m title, while canoe slalom athletes Mallory Franklin, Kimberley Woods and Adam Burgess join Forbes-Cryans in making their Olympic debuts.

British Canoeing chief executive David Joy said: “Nothing has changed other than the date of the Games.

“The athletes were selected for the Olympic Games in Tokyo through a transparent and results-driven process and it is right that their selections should remain.”

The body was asked by the British Olympic Association to “consider and confirm” that it still wanted to take the team nominated before the postponement.

British Sailing must also decide whether to take the team it announced in October 2019, and Team GB chef de mission Mark England said details of its decision “will be released in due course”.