Tipp duo to compete at European Youth Olympics

By Thomas Conway

Two Tipperary athletes will compete at the European Youth Olympic Festival (EYOP) to be staged in North Macedonia, from July 20th to 27th.

200 metre runner Joe Burke from Templemore and Roscrea badminton player Luke Marks are part of a 35-strong Irish team which will feature across eight sports, with up to 4,000 athletes from 48 different countries expected to participate.

The EYOP is a multi-sport competition which caters towards athletes aged fourteen to seventeen and mimics the Olympic format. It is usually held biennially. Past Irish participants include star runners Rhasidat Adeleke and Sarah Lavin, as well as Olympic swimmer Ellen Walshe.

Joe Burke

Templemore AC sprinter Burke is one of the most exciting emerging prospects in Irish athletics. The seventeen year-old recently surged to a bronze medal in the European U18 Athletics Championships in Slovakia, breaking the Irish 200 metre record with a time of 21.31s. To place that in context, the current Irish 200 metre senior record, recorded by Paul Hession in 2007, stands at 20.30s.

Understated and modest, Joe is coy when asked about his ambitions heading into the Festival, but that is a tactic which has served him well up until this point.

“I’d love to medal out there and do well, be in a final, be up there at the top of Europe, but I’m not going to set expectations for myself. I know and my coaches know what I’m capable of,” said Clonmore native Burke.

The seventeen year-old acknowledges how big of an honour it is to represent his county and his country at these games but sounds like a guy who won’t be phased by the experience. Training since the age of nine, he’s relatively new to such large-scale competitions, having only begun to excel in the sport in recent years. A prospective Leaving Cert student in Our Lady’s Secondary School, Templemore, he admits that he isn’t really sure which pathway he will pursue after secondary school, but one thing is for certain, he has a bright future when it comes to athletics.

Luke Marks

Like the Olympics, the beauty of the EYOP is that it acts as a showcase for numerous sports, both mainstream and niche. Badminton probably sits somewhere in the middle of those two categories.

Its membership base is growing, and is estimated to hover somewhere in the region of 19,000 members nationwide. The sport is popular in schools, and the country has consistently produced elite-ranking players which have competed at Olympic level. In Paris last year, both Nhat Nyugen and Rachel Darragh flew the Irish flag, following in the footsteps of the likes of Chloe Magee and Scott Evans.

The names are worshipped in the Marks household in Roscrea. The family is steeped in badminton, and it’s really no surprise that fourteen year-old Luke is making waves in the world of the shuttlecock. Luke’s father Pat was a formidable player in his younger days, but the connection to the sport extends to the previous generation, as Pat recounts.

“We were always involved in badminton, always playing badminton,” Pat said.

“I played a huge amount as a junior myself, and my parents really instilled the love of the game into me. My mother (Kathleen) was a very good player in her own right, playing for Tipperary and Munster, and both my mother and my father at different times were president of Badminton Ireland, which to this day is very unique in its own right.”

Luke will compete in both in singles, and mixed doubles alongside Dubliner Hannah Shochan. He’s looking forward to the competition, predicting that it will serve as an “amazing experience.”

He trains intensively, year-round. During the winter, there are several after-school escapades up to the Sport Ireland campus in Blanchardstown each week. He’s doing his homework on the way up, training for two hours, eating his dinner on the way down. Come summer, he basically lives up there, and at times, he admits that it’s not easy.

“Sometimes I’d be training two times a day, from six in the morning to seven in the evening,” Luke revealed.

“So, it’s tough to be doing that, especially in summer with the weather like it is at the moment.”

The EYOP will be an entirely new experience for him. He competed at a European Championship last year, but he’s never been part of a multi-sport team. Most of the athletes will be in the same boat, but Luke will be amongst the youngest out there. His whole family are travelling, and like Luke, they’re buzzing with anticipation.

In a nice piece of symmetry, one of the coaches overseeing Luke & Hannah out there will be Michael O’Meara, a decorated former badminton national champion and a nifty tennis player as well. As it happens, back in Michael’s teenage years, he was coached and mentored by Luke’s grandmother. He has fond memories of her courtside, and he often relays them to Luke.

“Luke doesn’t remember his granny well and every now and again I tell him stories about her,” Michael said.

“So, it’s very ironic that now I should be the one to coach him, when in the past she actually coached me. It’s a nice 360.”

Racquet sports are on the rise across the country, with pickle and padel-ball clubs rapidly taking shape in numerous locations. But Badminton is growing too. Last October, Badminton Ireland unveiled a new initiative in secondary schools designed to encourage teenage girls to play the sport and remain active. As Michael explains, the sport is most popular in east Asia, but the European game is also in good nick, and the epicentre is shifting somewhat.

“Traditionally you would have had the likes of China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Japan, Korea - the Asian countries. The number one country in Europe has traditionally for the past fifty years been Denmark, but since the 1990s France has been on the rise. Interestingly, of the top five current male singles players in Europe, two are Danish and three are French. It’s only a matter of time before France becomes the number one nation in Europe,” Michael said.