Waterhouse Byrne Baird Shield

It was first held in 1896, for members of the then-new Donore Harriers Club, when a Dublin jeweller by the name of Mr. Samuel Waterhouse, presented the Donore Harriers club with a silver shield for a 10-mile handicap cross-country race. The shield was known as the 'Donore Harriers Waterhouse Challenge Shield'. This race, now known as the Waterhouse Byrne Baird Shield, has been competed for every year on St. Stephen's Day (26 December), with the exception of 1916. It was because so many Donore members were away in the trenches of World War I that the 1916 race wasn’t held. Another factor was the proximity of the course to the Magazine Fort, which was then an ammunitions depot and the scene of one of the first casualties the Easter Rising Rebellion earlier that year. However, the race was held during the most part of World War I, and continued on during the Spanish flu, the Irish Civil War, World War II, the Tuberculosis epidemic, outbreaks of Foot and Mouth disease, and the severe weather conditions of 1962 and 2010 in Ireland. During the Foot and Mouth outbreak in 1967, the race was held on the road. Athletes that year ran five laps of the 'Eagle Lap'. The quicker road times overall that year are not counted for shield race records. History will also show that the 2020 and 2021 versions of the race survived the COVID-19 pandemic. The race starts and finishes every year at the same tree beside the Dog Pond on the horse gallop in the Phoenix Park, Dublin. The shield has to be won three times by the same person in order for the trophy to be claimed as the property of any one individual. In 1918, Paddy Byrne, after winning the trophy three times, re-presented the trophy to the club, and the same thing happened when Davie Baird, a man who had been seriously wounded at the Somme, similarly had three victories. But he managed to return to win in 1920, 1921, and again in 1937, to become immortalised in the event’s title as it currently stands. Leo Uhlemann has also won the trophy three times overall, but two of those occasions occurred after Davie Baird added his name to the trophy; thereby resetting the clock for all other previous winners. They had to begin again from scratch in their quest to win it three times in order to get their names added to the ’shield title’. The closest finish was in 1962, when Leo Lynch got to finish less than one yard ahead of the fast finishing scratch man Mick Neville. Earlier that year in January & February Neville became the only athlete ever to win all four individual Irish Cross Country Championships: AAU and IAAB Senior and Junior / Intermediate. No winner, however, was to be more celebrated than Frank Cahill. Born in 1900, he made his race debut in 1923. There then followed perhaps the most heroic series of failures in the history of athletics, because for the next 52 years he competed without success. In 1974, he was only 200 yards from the finish line when victory was snatched from his grasp. In 1975 he missed a race for the first time, due to a training accident but he returned in 1976 to finally triumph. Legend has it that "scratch athlete" – Eamonn Coghlan – was still finishing breakfast at home in Ranelagh when Cahill started out on the first of his five, two-mile laps. Within sight of the finish, he fell over; and had he accepted the help offered by concerned onlookers, he might have been disqualified. Luckily, he managed to get to his feet again unaided, and make it to the finish line without being caught and on to glory. His heroics made the front page of The Irish Times, where Peter Byrne noted that Irish sport had just been deprived of its "most illustrious loser". As Byrne added, Cahill’s attempts to win had spanned the political careers of two Cosgraves, WT and Liam. But a year later, Liam Cosgrave was no longer taoiseach, and Cahill was still going strong. Proving that it’s never too late to start winning; Cahill retained the Shield in 1977: breaking his own record – which still stands – as the shield’s oldest winner at the age of 77! In contrast, the youngest winner of the Shield was Willie Smith in 1958, aged 15 years. == Past winners ==