Sport
Athenry is home to St. Mary's G.A.A. club who have won numerous All-Ireland Senior Club Hurling Championships.
Athenry Athletics Club has had a large juvenile section for many years and was complemented in 2002 by a senior section. The senior section now has over 100 members, approximately half of whom are women. The club has produced two Olympic sprinters, Martina MacCarthy, who is from Oranmore and Paul Hession who hails from Ballydavid, just outside the town itself. MacCarthy represented Ireland in the women's 4 x 400 metres relay at the Sydney games and Hession competed in the 200 metres at the Beijing games. A number of other club members have represented their country with distinction in both track and field and cross country across Europe and North America.
Athenry is also home to Athenry Soccer Club which reached the 2006 final of the FAI Junior Cup. In 2007 Athenry Soccer Club became the Galway Premier League Champions for the first time in the clubs 36 year history. The club has followed this by winning the Galway Premier Title again in 2008 & 2010. In 2007,2008,2010 & 2011 Athenry Soccer Club also captured the Connaught Junior Cup title.
Athenry Golf Club is an eighteen hole championship course located between Athenry and Oranmore in the townland of Palmerstown. The club is a mixture of parkland and heathland built on a limestone base against the backdrop of a large forest giving excellent drainage, which makes the course playable all year round. Athenry Golf course was extended to 18 holes in 1991 under the guidance of architect Eddie Hackett and further improvements in recent years have led to the club hosting recent Provincial and National championships.
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Famous quotes containing the word sport:
“What sport shall we devise here in this garden
To drive away the heavy thought of care?”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“Rabelais, for instance, is intolerable; one chapter is better than a volume,—it may be sport to him, but it is death to us. A mere humorist, indeed, is a most unhappy man; and his readers are most unhappy also.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence: in other words it is war minus the shooting.
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—George Orwell (1903–1950)