Camaraderie, togetherness and ‘geekiness’ – the Irish athletics fans travelling the world to support their team

Olympics.com ended up a recipient of the supporters’ generosity and welcoming nature when invited to hitch a lift on their coach to the Glasgow arena at the World Athletics Indoor Championships in March.

On that coach thrumming with excitable fans, some of those who travel together to events around the world to support the Ireland athletics team spoke about their experiences, including main protagonist, Carey.

“I’ve grown up in a family that were always athletic obsessed. My dad was a masters athlete, my sister,” he said, nodding towards his sibling sitting nearby, “used to run a lot. I ran, not at a very good level, but I enjoyed it. But we always watched on TV, always watched the championships but we’d never actually gone to any.”

After becoming self-employed in 2014, Carey had more flexibility and decided to start going to some events.

“So, my sister and I went to one in the European Indoors in Prague in 2015, and so I just tweeted as I normally would, saying, ‘Hey, we’re two Irish fans going to the European Indoors. If there’s other fans around, we’d love to meet up or grab a drink or whatever’.

“And so, we met a group of eight to 10 British fans and some Irish fans, and we all hung out and had an amazing weekend.”

The next event they headed to was the world indoors in Belgrade in 2016. Carey volunteered to organise the tickets and hotels and social events around the championships, with around 15 people joining this time around.

“Since then, it has just been getting bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger,” Carey told us while talking over the seat in a manner recognised by all coach travellers.

“It’s a mixture of Irish supporters, British supporters, there’s a Bahamian on the bus and Germans,” said Carey of the current group in Rome, who have purchased 417 tickets over the six sessions. “But we’re just all joined together by a shared love of athletics and a little bit of the nerdiness associated with it.”

That nerdiness becomes all too clear when Carey explains the athletics-based quiz night they’d held in a bar recently.

“For the quiz, you name an athletic event and go round in the circle and each person has to name the national record holder of one country, and if you get one wrong, you’re knocked out. So, it’s last man, or last woman, standing as the winner.

“So, it’s that kind of obsessive athletics stuff that’s nice to be able to share with other people, and I think that’s the power of sports. The power of social media, too, in being able to get like-minded people together.”