The 42FM

Sinead O’Carroll dials in from northern Italy to tell Niall Kelly about all of the sporting and political action in Milano Cortina.Several US athletes, including Amber Glenn and Hunter Hess, have spoken up against the Trump administration this week, which has led to an inevitable backlash from the US President and his Maga base. Sinead relays the atmosphere in Italy and assesses a week where Trump has been further angered at sporting occasions, his displeasure with the Bad Bunny half-time apparent to all with an internet connection. How does this bode for the rest of the Winter Olympics, and the World Cup in the summer?Also, Irish competitors have been flying the flag with honour in Italy. But is there one winter sport in which Ireland could go from zero to powerhouse status? If so, what could it be?

Sinead is off to northern Italy for the Winter Olympics this week. Today she tells Gav about her lifelong fascination with figure skating: how it started, how it developed and what she expects to see over the coming days in Milano Cortina.Also, Sinead runs the rule over Ireland’s four Winter Olympians and rates their chances.We delve into the reduced representation of 13 Russian athletes, who compete as neutrals. Is the ban fair to apolitical sportspeople from Russia - or would the presence of the Russian flag validate the Putin regime?

French rugby player Thibaud Flament last week announced that he would not be available to play Ireland in the Six Nations owing to his and his wife’s fertility treatment. On this week’s show, Sinéad and Gavin discuss Flament’s story in the context of how the media covers matters of pregnancy, fertility and parenthood in elite sport.They illustrate how things have moved on from the days a man would be expected to miss the birth of his child but ask if the conversation has evolved far enough, explaining how we still speak differently of fatherhood as opposed to motherhood and how this reinforces wider tropes.Get in touch - sinead@thejournal.ie and gavincooney@the42.ie

Cyclists have become a nightmare in Dublin, according to one headline-making judge last week.And Judge James O’Donohoe is far from alone in Ireland in feeling comfortable criticising cyclists, despite the fact that 14 were killed in our roads last year, and 45 in the past five years.This week Gav and Sinead discuss why so many people have such a negative view of cyclists, and cycling itself. Why are the misdemeanors of cyclists talked up while those of drivers in powerful vehicles are overlooked? Why was there a furore over the runaway costs of a bike shed at Leinster House, when the far more expensive car parking facilities are rarely discussed?Is cycling seen in Ireland as an anachronism - more redolent of our rustic, poorer past and not in keeping with our modern view of ourselves? Or has cycling become part of the online battleground, with the seemingly neutral activity labelled as woke by some culture warriors?How is the Irish attitude to cycling so different from other northern Europeans, in the Netherlands and Denmark for Scandinavia for example?

Why is the purported biggest club in British football in such a perpetual state of chaos? Gavin and Sinead delve into the reasons United have failed to adapt to a post Alex Ferguson world, and come to the conclusion that the club needs a powerful figure to oversee the empire, even if that figure is not always reasonable.We are living in a time of corporate committees running football clubs, with managers and head coaches relegated to the status of a replaceable cog in a wheel.Yet Gavin argues that this approach is unsuitable to the world of football, where the most successful Premier League clubs in recent seasons still have one dominant, talented figure in charge: Pep Guardiola at Manchester City, Jurgen Klopp at Liverpool and now Arsenal under Mikel Arteta.United, he argues, are afraid of talent, and need to stop investing huge responsibility in head coaches, while not giving them the requisite authority to do their job - which is to lead and do what it takes for the club to thrive at the elite and of the game.

In these uncertain times, getting even less certain by the hour, Sinead and Gavin take a look ahead to the summer’s World Cup in America and discuss how it will play out.Most fundamentally, will it take place against a backdrop of military activity? US co-hosts Mexico and Canada have already felt the chill of Donald Trump’s threatening rhetoric, which can, as recent events show, turn to action.Even if we are in times of peace by June, the World Cup could be beset by several issues. We discuss travel bans to fans of four competing nations and how these undermine the spirit of the competition.Will Trump follow through on his threat to move games out of certain cities? Will ICE agents arrest fans gathering to watch games? And how will Trump seek to make the most of the global attention that will be available to him during the World Cup?