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Cian O'Connor celebrates winning the gold medal at the Athens Olympic Games. INPHO
Well read

Cian O'Connor's rise and fall, Páidí Ó Sé's greatness and Sports Stadium recalled

Here’s the best of the internet this week.

 1. “He was a bull as they saw it and a wild bull at that, but he was theirs now, ready to knock spots off them. Alan Mangan first heard the news in Gran Canaria, initially presuming it just mischief. Páidí Ó Sé, that Kerry institution, was coming to manage Westmeath, coming all the way from Ventry, an approximation of Uzbekistan. But the hullabaloo aroused at home soon caught a persuasive wind and, within hours of landing in Las Palmas, three of them were exploring options for early flights home.”

For the Irish Independent, Vincent Hogan explores how Páidí Ó Sé turned Westmeath into winners.

2. “On the morning of the individual showjumping competition at the 2012 Olympics, Cian O’Connor got out of bed at six o’clock and took his competition whites down from the hook. His wife, bleary-eyed and confused, asked what he was at. When he replied that he was going to present his horse to the judges on the off-chance that one of the finalists pulled out, she sighed. “It’s over, Cian,” she said. Except it wasn’t. Thirty-five horses had qualified for the final session, with O’Connor and Blue Loyd in 36th. One by one, the horses came up for inspection and one by one, they passed. Until the final horse, a Swedish entry, banged himself in the stable and showed up lame.”

 Malachy Clerkin takes a look at the rise and fall of Cian O’Connor’s golden dream for the Irish Times.

3. “He asked me why I wanted to interview Michael first and I said that that’s just what I normally do,” Hehir said. “I told him I get the first big one out of the way and then kind of have all these other interviews rotate around them like a satellite. Ezra said that’s not the way he would do it. By the end of that dinner, I decided that he was right for a story this big. I needed to get certain basics down first before I went to Michael. We interviewed (longtime NBA executive) Brian McIntyre, (author and Phil Jackson confidant) Charley Rosen and David Stern the day before we interviewed Michael to give us the basic bedrock of the story we were trying to tell just for the first couple of episodes. (They also filmed interviews in Chicago with Doug Collins, Jerry Reinsdorf, Rick Telander and Bill Wennington prior to interviewing Jordan.) I could give their interviews to my editors and make it start to plant the seed of what this thing was going to become.” The initial agreement between Jordan’s team and the filmmakers was two interviews with Jordan and access to some sort of behind-the-scenes lifestyle footage. Hehir worked under the premise that there would only be two interviews. But that would eventually change.”

The Athletic’s Richard Deitsch goes behind the scenes of the Michael Jordan ‘Last Dance’ documentary.

4. Now we have no sport, maybe it’s easier to look back at Sports Stadium and consider those to be glory days. Happier times, when the only disease we knew was the liver fluke and brucellosis and scour infecting every second advert. We hadn’t much of anything but we had a little of a lot. And we arguably had too much racing. Every Saturday, we were at Naas, or Newbury, or the Curragh. Non-runner number nine, 11 ran. And it was always raining. But we had a lot more besides. A scattering of seeds that grew a love of sport. And a few magic beans.” 

Larry Ryan of the Irish Examiner chats with Michael Lyster, Stephen Alkin, George Hamilton, Maurice Reidy and Michael O’Carroll as they recall the heyday of RTÉ’s flagship Saturday show ‘Sports Stadium’.

5. Lenny Abrahamson came to it with an outsider’s eye. But that has always been the way with his family. One of his grandfathers ended up as a scholar of Irish in Trinity College, remarkable given he came from a poor Russian/Polish speaking family in Poland. Abrahamson has thrived as a filmmaker for many reasons. One is the family trait for moving outside the comfort zone. It has long been a source of puzzlement how little impact the GAA has made on Irish writers, artists and filmmakers.”

Kieran Cunningham takes a look at a portrait of the artist as a GAA man for Buzz.ie

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