Celebrating 100 years of the Cork County Senior Cross Country Championships

ON Sunday, the Cork County Senior Cross-country Championships for men and women take place at Carrigadrohid near Macroom.

But for the diligence and research carried out by two members of the East Cork club, a fact that may have escaped many of those taking part is that this year marks the 100th anniversary of the staging of the original championship.

It is appropriate that the two in question – Denis McCarthy and Liam O’Brien – should undertake this valuable piece of work as both have a close affinity with the annual cross-country decider.

Ballynoe native McCarthy has the unique distinction of having run in 40 of those championships – including twice as a scoring member of the winning team – while Olympian O’Brien won the individual title in 1989 and was also on the winning East Cork team on nine occasions.

Both credit the book ‘ Cork Champions Past & Present’, written by Liam Fleming from Ballinscarthy in 2013, as their main source of information. 

“I suppose I would be in and out of that book fairly regularly and so I became aware that the first championship took place in 1923,” explains Denis.

That inaugural race was held at the Cork Showgrounds on April 29 and was won by J Corcoran of Owenabue Athletic Club. Unfortunately, his first name is not recorded. 

The team contest was a tie between Owenabue AC and Blarney AC. That fixture was organised by the newly-formed National Athletics and Cycling Association of Ireland (NACAI). Prior to that, the GAA organised Irish Athletics.

“In 1927, a perpetual cup was donated by Donal Barrett, a subsequent County Board chairman and National NACAI president. and Collins AC were the first winners of the cup which is still contested today,” says Denis. Over the century, the championships didn’t take place on four occasions – 1939, 1941, 1942 (the latter due to foot-and-mouth) and in 2020 because of Covid.

The Cork title has always been regarded as one of the hardest to win, outside of the national championship. A brief look at some previous winners shows that Helsinki 1952 Olympian marathoner Joe West, a native of Carrigaline, took the title in 1945, 1947 and 1953. Ted Geary from Ballymore went one better, winning in 1956, 1957, 1958 and 1961.

DOMINATED

Two other Olympians, Donie Walsh (Leevale) and John Hartnett (Grange), shared seven wins between them in the 1970s. The following decade, Tony O’Leary of Leevale dominated with seven titles while in the 1990s Donncha O’Mahony had five wins and was also a scoring member of his East Cork winning team on an incredible 15 occasions.

“The race itself is not without its turbulence,” states McCarthy. “From 1923 until 1967 the NACAI were the organisers and then in 1967, in an effort to reunite the two bodies governing Irish athletics (AAU and NACAI), the new body BLE was formed.

“This worked quite well until the two organisations split, so in Cork we then had two county senior championships from 1968 to 2000, before the present Athletics Association of Ireland came into being.” 

The NACAI produced its own array of stars, namely Willie Webb (Rising Sun) in the 1960s, Ger Murphy (Meelin and Millstreet) in the 1970s and John O’Driscoll (Bandon Bridge) in the 1980s.

A women’s championship was introduced for the first time in 1966 when Catherine Barry of Emerald AC was the winner. 

Marie Buckley from Kinsale had three victories in the early 1970s while Valerie O’Mahony-Collins (Togher) was a five-time winner (1979, 1983, 1986, 1988, 1989).

However, the greatest number of wins is held by Louth native Louise Cavanagh, a member of UCC AC, who took first on nine occasions. Leevale’s Lizzie Lee completed a five-in-a-row between 2009 and 2013 before returning to win her sixth race in 2021.

In between those years, another Leevale athlete, Michelle Finn, notched up six wins and it’s interesting to note that Michelle’s mother, Mary, won the NACAI version of the race twice in the 1990s.

Before underage categories were customary, Margaret Nagle (Millstreet/Donoughmore) was just 14 when she won the NACAI title in 1973 while the youngest men’s winner is St Finbarr’s stalwart John Buckley who was aged 19 in 1965.

“Great credit is due to the men and women of the Cork County Board, past and present, for maintaining the great tradition of this race, so roll on the next century,” concludes Denis McCarthy, the main compiler of this important piece of athletics history.