Bandon AC's track works on the home straight after grant

After an excellent 2024, Bandon Athletic Club are gearing up for a special 2025, too.

The club celebrated its 60th anniversary this year, an occasion made all the more special by the fact that two athletes who started out there – Ballineen’s Phil Healy and Kilbrittain’s Nicola Tuthill – competed for Ireland at the Olympic Games in Paris.

Now, following the confirmation of the awarding of €404,000 in the recent Sports Capital Grants, the hope is that work can be completed to get the club’s new purpose-built track up and running for next rummer.

Having had different bases around Bandon since formation, the club has been based in the Town Park on a grass track for the last three decades but a nine-acre site on the Kilbrittain road was identified as the new home and a grant of €290,000 helped to get work started.

“We purchased the land in February of 2021,” says chairperson Adrian O’Flynn.

“We got the sports capital grant at the back end of that year and then the first work started in 2022.

“We did a number of different things. We did fundraising – we set up the club lotto and then you go after corporate sponsorship.

“Because of the overall cost, we as a club said that you could go one way and borrow the money, which could put a big pull on the club itself, or two, we go down the route of the sports capital grant and take an extra year or two to get it done, without then having the struggle of a loan on the club.

“A year isn’t a long time to wait in that regard – the grant is a significant amount to support the club in basically getting the project over the line next year.

“It’s weather-dependent but we’d be hoping that, by the back end of the summer, we’ll have it open at that stage.”

Given the Olympic escapades of Healy with the 4x400m relay team and Tuthill in the hammer throw, the timing could scarcely be better as younger club members see that it is possible to go all the way while representing Bandon.

“Ireland’s good showing at the European Championships and the Olympics was a real boost to athletics,” O’Flynn says, “and having Phil, from a local perspective, gives it an extra boost.

“Then, Nicola Tuthill is with UCD at the moment because of her scholarship but her roots are in Bandon, that’s where she started with the hammer.

“Having those two role models for young people is a big thing. Both of them are really accessible – when we had the Catherine Duggan Memorial Sports Day in August, both of them were there all day, signing autographs and taking photographs with anybody that wanted one.

“In Phil’s younger years, she mightn’t have been winning all of the races but she was a late bloomer.

“It shows everybody that, just because you’re not winning at U9, U10, U11, if you persevere and you’re resilient enough, it can happen for people later in their teenage years.”

In addition, there is a spirit of sporting ecumenism in O’Flynn’s hopes that the track can be useful for more than just the athletic club.

“We hope that other sporting organisations in the town would use it as well,” he says.

“Especially in the wintertime, when you don’t want to be running around a mucky field, it might make sense to go to the track and take use of those facilities.

“Then, during the daytime, it’ll be available to the schools of the town and the local branch of Special Olympics Ireland will have access to it too, so it should benefit the entire community.”