B1 · Intermediate
10 min
irish culturesport and identityfolklorediasporaamateur sport
Seventy-Five Years of Almost
Setenta y cinco años sin ganar
Mayo, a small county on Ireland's west coast, has just won the national Gaelic football championship for the first time in 75 years. Fletcher and Octavio dig into the curse, the amateur tradition, and what the GAA means for Irish identity.
Mayo, un pequeño condado del oeste de Irlanda, acaba de ganar el campeonato nacional de fútbol gaélico por primera vez en 75 años. Fletcher y Octavio hablan de la maldición, del deporte amateur y de lo que significa el GAA para la identidad irlandesa.
7 essential B1-level terms from this episode, with translations and example sentences in Spanish.
| Spanish | English | Example |
|---|---|---|
| la maldición | the curse | La gente de Mayo creía en una maldición que duró setenta y cinco años. |
| el condado | the county | Mayo es un condado pequeño en el oeste de Irlanda. |
| el cortejo fúnebre | the funeral procession | El autobús del equipo no paró cuando pasó el cortejo fúnebre. |
| aficionado | fan, supporter | Los aficionados de Mayo esperaron setenta y cinco años para ver ganar a su equipo. |
| llevar + tiempo + gerundio | to have been doing something for a period of time | Llevo dos horas estudiando español y todavía no entiendo todo. |
| amateur | amateur, non-professional | Los jugadores del GAA son amateurs; trabajan y también juegan al fútbol gaélico. |
| la identidad | identity | Para los irlandeses, el condado es una parte importante de su identidad. |
Honest question for you, Octavio: have you ever watched Gaelic football?
No, nunca.
No, never.
¿Por qué me lo preguntas?
Why do you ask?
Because something happened yesterday in Dublin that, if you follow Irish sport even a little, you'd know is a genuinely historic moment.
A county called Mayo won the All-Ireland Senior Football Championship.
Their first title in seventy-five years.
¡Setenta y cinco años!
Seventy-five years!
Eso es mucho tiempo.
That is a long time.
¿Por qué tardaron tanto?
Why did they take so long?
That, my friend, is the question.
And the answer involves a funeral procession, a supposed curse, eleven lost finals, and one of the most devoted sporting communities in Europe.
But before we get into any of that, we should probably explain what Gaelic football actually is.
Sí, porque no es fútbol como nosotros lo conocemos.
Yes, because it is not football as we know it.
Es un deporte irlandés, muy antiguo.
It is an Irish sport, very old.
Los jugadores pueden correr con el balón en la mano, también pueden chutarlo.
Players can run with the ball in their hand, they can also kick it.
Hay una portería especial, como una mezcla entre fútbol y rugby.
There is a special goal, like a mix between football and rugby.
And it's organized through the GAA, the Gaelic Athletic Association, which was founded in 1884.
Partly a sports body, partly a cultural institution, partly, in its early decades, a quiet act of political defiance against British rule.
Claro, porque en esa época Irlanda todavía era parte del Imperio Británico.
Right, because at that time Ireland was still part of the British Empire.
El GAA fue una forma de decir: tenemos nuestra propia cultura, nuestro propio idioma, nuestros propios deportes.
The GAA was a way of saying: we have our own culture, our own language, our own sports.
And here's the thing that still genuinely astonishes me about the GAA even after all these years: the players are amateurs.
Every single one of them.
These guys playing in front of eighty thousand people at Croke Park yesterday, they have day jobs.
Sí, eso es muy importante.
Yes, that is very important.
Son agricultores, profesores, enfermeros.
They are farmers, teachers, nurses.
Entrenan por la noche, después del trabajo.
They train at night, after work.
No reciben dinero por jugar.
They receive no money for playing.
Es completamente diferente al fútbol profesional.
It is completely different from professional football.
I spent a week in County Mayo in 2003, writing about emigration from the west of Ireland.
It's beautiful country, Atlantic coast, pretty sparse population.
Maybe four hundred thousand people in the whole county.
And the GAA club in every single village was the center of everything.
En España entendemos esto.
In Spain we understand this.
Los equipos de fútbol en los pueblos pequeños también son muy importantes para la comunidad.
Football clubs in small towns are also very important for the community.
No es solo deporte, es identidad.
It is not just sport, it is identity.
But Mayo is a particularly interesting case, because they've been good for decades.
Really good.
They've reached eleven All-Ireland finals since their last win in 1951.
Eleven.
And they lost every single one.
¡Once finales perdidas!
Eleven lost finals!
Eso no es mala suerte normal.
That is not normal bad luck.
Eso es...
That is something more.
algo más.
That's exactly what the people of Mayo started to say.
Something more.
And that's where the curse comes in.
¿Una maldición?
A curse?
Cuéntame.
Tell me.
¿Qué pasó exactamente?
What happened exactly?
The legend goes like this: in 1951, after Mayo won the All-Ireland, the team was traveling home through the county.
Their bus passed through a village called Foxford, and at that moment a funeral was taking place.
A cortège was crossing the road.
And the players, so the story goes, didn't stop.
Didn't get out of the bus.
Didn't pay their respects.
Y el cura que llevaba el funeral los maldijo.
And the priest conducting the funeral cursed them.
Dijo que el condado de Mayo nunca ganaría otra vez mientras viviera alguno de los jugadores de ese equipo.
He said that County Mayo would never win again while any of the players from that team were still alive.
Which is, depending on your disposition, either a genuinely eerie piece of folklore or a convenient narrative that a community built around a long run of painful near-misses.
I find myself drawn to the second interpretation, but I'm also aware that I've never lost eleven finals.
Yo creo que las dos cosas son verdad al mismo tiempo.
I think both things are true at the same time.
La maldición no es real, pero la necesidad de explicar tanto dolor sí es real.
The curse is not real, but the need to explain so much pain is real.
La gente necesita una historia.
People need a story.
That's well put, actually.
And that story took on a life of its own.
Irish journalists wrote about it seriously.
Priests in Mayo publicly denied it, which somehow made people more convinced.
The last of the 1951 players, a man named Paddy Prendergast, died in 2012, and after that there was this quiet, communal exhale of: okay, now the curse is technically over.
And then they lost two more finals.
¡Claro!
Of course!
Porque cuando pierdes después de que dicen que la maldición terminó, necesitas una nueva explicación.
Because when you lose after they say the curse is over, you need a new explanation.
The human capacity for retroactive myth-making is remarkable.
But let's talk about yesterday, and about who they beat.
Because this wasn't just any final.
It was Mayo versus Kerry.
¿Y Kerry es el equipo más importante en el fútbol gaélico?
And is Kerry the most important team in Gaelic football?
Kerry is the New Zealand All Blacks of Gaelic football.
They have thirty-eight All-Ireland titles.
Thirty-eight.
They've won it so many times that it almost feels like their birthright.
Es como el Real Madrid en España.
It is like Real Madrid in Spain.
Todo el mundo tiene una opinión sobre ellos.
Everyone has an opinion about them.
O los amas o los odias.
Either you love them or you hate them.
And for Mayo fans, beating Kerry specifically, in a final specifically, after seventy-five years, carries a weight that's almost impossible to explain to someone outside it.
It's not just a win.
It's a win against the team that represents everything you've never been able to achieve.
Entiendo eso perfectamente.
I understand that perfectly.
En el fútbol español, hay victorias que son más importantes porque son contra ciertos rivales.
In Spanish football, there are victories that matter more because they are against certain rivals.
No es lo mismo ganar el campeonato que ganar al Real Madrid.
Winning the championship is not the same as beating Real Madrid.
Now, here's the part of this story I find genuinely moving.
Mayo is a county that has hemorrhaged people for a hundred and fifty years.
The Famine hit it devastatingly in the 1840s.
Then emigration, wave after wave, to Boston, to New York, to London, to Sydney.
Sí, los irlandeses emigraron a muchos países.
Yes, the Irish emigrated to many countries.
Y llevaron su cultura con ellos, incluyendo el GAA.
And they took their culture with them, including the GAA.
Hay clubes de fútbol gaélico en Buenos Aires, en Tokio, en Dubai.
There are Gaelic football clubs in Buenos Aires, in Tokyo, in Dubai.
And yesterday, in pubs in Boston and in living rooms in London and in God knows where else, there were people whose grandparents left Mayo who were watching this final.
People who've never set foot in Ireland holding their breath about the same result.
Eso es algo especial de la identidad irlandesa.
That is something special about Irish identity.
Los irlandeses que viven fuera de Irlanda todavía se sienten muy conectados con su condado de origen.
Irish people who live outside Ireland still feel very connected to their county of origin.
No es solo el país, es el condado específico.
It is not just the country, it is the specific county.
County identity in Ireland runs deep in a way that's genuinely hard to translate.
When you ask an Irish person where they're from, you don't get the country, you don't get the city.
You get the county.
That's the unit of identity.
And the GAA reinforces that every single year.
En España también tenemos esto.
In Spain we have this too.
Si preguntas a un vasco de dónde es, no dice 'de España'.
If you ask a Basque person where they are from, they do not say 'from Spain'.
Dice 'del País Vasco', o 'de Bilbao'.
They say 'from the Basque Country', or 'from Bilbao'.
La identidad regional es muy fuerte.
Regional identity is very strong.
And the GAA was, from its very founding, a deliberate cultural project.
Not just a sports organization.
The association also governs hurling, camogie, handball.
And for a long time, its members were banned from playing, or even watching, so-called foreign games.
Meaning soccer.
Meaning rugby.
The rule wasn't dropped until 1971.
¡Interesante!
Interesting!
Entonces el deporte fue una forma de resistencia cultural.
So sport was a form of cultural resistance.
Como decir: nosotros no necesitamos los deportes ingleses, tenemos los nuestros.
Like saying: we do not need English sports, we have our own.
Exactly.
And Croke Park, where the final was played yesterday, stands on ground where British forces shot dead fourteen civilians during a Gaelic football match in 1920.
Bloody Sunday.
The stadium itself is a site of memory.
Eso cambia todo.
That changes everything.
No es solo un estadio.
It is not just a stadium.
Es un lugar con una historia muy dolorosa.
It is a place with a very painful history.
Cuando Mayo ganó allí ayer, estaban ganando en un lugar muy especial para Irlanda.
When Mayo won there yesterday, they were winning in a very special place for Ireland.
And these players, these amateur players with their day jobs, they carry all of that.
Whether they think about it consciously or not, every time they put on that green and red jersey, they're stepping into something much larger than a game.
Y llevaban setenta y cinco años esperando este momento.
And they had been waiting seventy-five years for this moment.
Eso es mucho tiempo de esperar para una comunidad tan pequeña.
That is a long time to wait for such a small community.
You know, I just caught that construction you used.
'Llevaban setenta y cinco años esperando.' That's not something you'd translate word-for-word into English.
What's happening there exactly?
Sí, es una estructura muy útil en español.
Yes, it is a very useful structure in Spanish.
'Llevar' más un período de tiempo más el verbo en gerundio.
'Llevar' plus a period of time plus the verb in gerund form.
Por ejemplo: 'llevo dos horas estudiando', o 'llevan tres días trabajando'.
For example: 'llevo dos horas estudiando', or 'llevan tres días trabajando'.
Significa que la acción empezó en el pasado y continúa todavía.
It means the action started in the past and is still continuing.
So 'llevaban setenta y cinco años esperando' is literally something like 'they had been carrying seventy-five years of waiting.' The waiting is the ongoing action.
English would just say 'they'd been waiting for seventy-five years', but your version feels more physical somehow, like the time has weight.
Me gusta esa idea.
I like that idea.
En español, 'llevar' normalmente significa 'to carry'.
In Spanish, 'llevar' normally means 'to carry'.
Entonces sí, cuando dices 'llevo tres años viviendo en Madrid', hay una idea de que llevas ese tiempo contigo.
So yes, when you say 'llevo tres años viviendo en Madrid', there is an idea that you carry that time with you.
Es tuyo, lo has vivido.
It is yours, you have lived it.
Which is somehow the perfect frame for what happened yesterday.
Those Mayo fans weren't just waiting.
They were carrying the wait.
All seventy-five years of it.
Y por fin, ayer, la dejaron caer.
And finally, yesterday, they put it down.
Ya no la necesitaban más.
They did not need it anymore.