Fallon's Town Talk: Aoife’s controversial defeat leaves a sour taste

How strange that the most successful week in Ireland’s 100 years of Olympic participation should leave a sour taste in Roscommon. 

Aoife O’Rourke’s controversial defeat by Elzbieta Wojcik of Poland in the women’s boxing 75kg last 16 bout last Wednesday produced an outburst of emotion ranging from fury to bewilderment to sympathy for the Castlerea Olympian.

Aoife’s stunned reaction to the verdict is one of those indelible images that will be seared on the Roscommon folk memory. Her dignified post-fight interview showed her class and demonstrated why she is so popular in Roscommon.

X, the artist formerly known as Twitter, went into one of its inevitable meltdowns although it was noticeable that ‘Aoife’ was still trending in the top five topics on Thursday afternoon, which is a far longer shelf life than is normal on social media.

It wasn’t just the usual keyboard warriors who were angered by the unfairness of the result. Former world super bantamweight champion Bernard Dunne was appreciably more upset than his fellow RTÉ television analysts and branded the decision “disgraceful” on ‘Morning Ireland.’ The BBC’s boxing analyst, Steve Bunce, thought that O’Rourke had won the fight comfortably. Des Cahill, the normally unflappable RTÉ presenter, was uncharacteristically annoyed. He was still criticising the verdict on ‘The Claire Byrne Show’ on Thursday morning and admitted he hadn’t been as bothered by a sporting result in a long time.

To my untrained eye, the fight became more like a wrestling contest with Wojick’s antics preventing O’Rourke from developing any rhythm. Former Olympic silver medallist Kenneth Egan directed his ire at the referee rather than the judges. The consensus among the experts was Wojcik should have been docked points more than just once.

One of the best lines on the fiasco came on the ‘Irish Examiner’ Olympic podcast when Brendan O’Brien said the referee was like a substitute teacher on his first day and the students ran rings around him. The key difference, of course, is the referee is experienced and is supposed to be world-class.

Maurice Brosnan, the well-known GAA writer who is covering the boxing for the ‘Irish Examiner’, described O’Rourke’s fight as “a perfect storm” where a weak referee, poor judging and a substandard performance from Aoife all came together to cost her victory.

It was reminiscent of the era when shocks happened in the FA Cup. The classic scenario would see a lower-division outfit tear into their classier, top-flight opponents while an indulgent referee turned a blind eye to their robust fouls. As happened back in the day, the giantkiller, in this case Wojick, was invariably knocked out in the next round.

If Aoife was the victim of terrible refereeing, her compatriot Daina Moorehouse was undone by a blatant ‘home town’ decision that was a throwback to suspicious victories by Italian soccer clubs in the 1970s and 1980s. The treatment of Moorehouse was so obviously wrong that it took some of the spotlight off what happened to O’Rourke.

By the weekend the unjust treatment of O’Rourke and Moorehouse had been subsumed into the wider narrative of the poor performance of the Irish boxing team, apart from the outstanding Kellie Harrington.

Last Sunday, the highly-respected boxing journalist Seán McGoldrick, an ardent critic of the scoring system, wrote: “Even though the decisions in the O’Rourke and Grainne Walsh fights were marginal, and controversial in the case of O’Rourke, the reality is that neither fulfilled their potential.” Of course, the big picture is the future of boxing in the Olympics. The campaign to restore boxing to the Olympic schedule for Los Angeles in 2028 has been dealt a potentially knock-out blow.

The paradox is that if the International Olympic Committee sticks to its decision to get rid of boxing because of the fallout from the controversies in Paris, it means the victims of those dubious decisions, such as Aoife, won’t get a chance to set the record straight in the future.

Elsewhere, some people got so carried away, they were disappointed that swimmer Daniel Wiffen (already 800m freestyle champion) and the double sculls rowers won bronze rather than gold. This after a week when Irish competitors scooped a record haul of seven medals. To put that in context, between 1960 and 1992 Ireland won six medals; what Ireland’s representatives have achieved at these Olympics is extraordinary. Hopefully, the heroics will continue this week.