Inside Track: Curiosity Corner

KNOW YOUR INITIALS

1: HKR – The League we play in is not in Union with the other crowd

2: ICT – We caused one of the great Scottish Cup shocks

3: JBM – Good with both football and sliotar

4: DPI – I ended Tony McCoy’s Grand National famine

5: MTM – Three-time winner of the English Greyhound Derby

6: JPR – I played with Louth senior footballers well into my 30s

7: FMM – There was a time when achieving it was rare for a middle-distance athlete

8: BOD – Not the rugby player, but a racecourse in Great Britain – with a couple of hyphens thrown in

9: JFH – A Chelsea legend?

10: TOD – It’s where Millwall played before moving to their New grounds

ON THE ROAD

When Louth seniors play Clare on Sunday next they’ll be visiting a fifth venue since the beginning of the championship. There have been two trips to Newbridge, and one each to Tullamore, Croke Park, Newry and now Portlaoise.

The under-20s have been to Blessington, Co Wicklow, Parnell Park, Newbridge, Longford and Armagh, with two games at Darver.

HE SAID

“I came back here (Dublin) and went back to my job without getting paid for the time I was off. He had a (Gold) medal in his back pocket and was given a house and a car by the Castro government. That was the norm (in Cuba).” Boxer, Mick Dowling, recalling his outing in the 1972 Munich Olympics.

The Dublin bantamweight had met Cuba’s Orlando Martinez in the second round and was considered by many to have done enough to get the verdict. The judges thought otherwise, giving a split decision to the Cuban.

It didn’t make Dowling feel any better when Martinez went on to win the title, or getting no wages for the work he missed while in Germany. Olympic boxing was amateur at the time, in that there was no pay.

But there were always questions about the conditions of how some countries, Russia in particular, prepared their team with a huge emphasis on what they had for breakfast.

POLITICS IN SPORT

Spain v USSR. Franco v Khrushchev. Facism v Communism. The final of the 1964 European Championship, the first renewal of the competition, had it all.

Dictator General Franco had forbidden the Spanish team from competing against USSR in the quarter-final of the first running of the competition, in 1960. The Russians went on to win the title.

The competition was staged in Spain four years later, and this time Franco gave his country’s side the go ahead. Not only that, he turned up for the final, for which Spain had qualified facing none other than USSR.

To get that far, Spain had beaten the Republic of Ireland 7-1 on aggregate at the quarter-final stage, and Hungary in the semis.

A crowd of over 75,000 gathered for the final at the Bernabéu. Spain won, putting two goals past arguably the greatest goalkeeper ever, Lev Yashin, and conceded just one.

Franco claimed it wasn’t so much one team beating another, but a victory for Facism over Communism. You’d only wish they would stay away.

WOULD YOU BELIEVE IT?

Could you imagine there being a false start to a marathon? Well, it happened – at the Olympics, above all places.

Forty-six lined up for the long-distance event at the 1956 Melbourne Games. Claiming one of the runners had taken off a second before he had fired the gun, the starter recalled the field.

If any of the runners were unnerved by the false start, they had plenty of time to get over it. France’s Alain Mimoun led the field home, with the title-holder, the great Czech runner, Emil Zapopek, back in 6th.

Zatopek had caused a sensation at the 1952 Games in Helsinki, winning the 5,000m and 10,000m and then the marathon, having only decided to try for the treble a short time before the start. For good measure, his wife, Dana, won the javelin at the same Games.

ANSWERS

Know Your Initials: 1Hull Kingston Rovers, 2 Inverness Caledonian Thistle, 3 Jimmy Barry Murphy, 4 Don’t Push It, 5 Mick The Miller, 6 JP Rooney, 7 Four Minute Mile, 8 Bangor-on-Dee, 9 Jimmy Floyd-Hasselbaink, 10 The Old Den.