Tipperary people wanted to help celebrate 30 years of GOAL Mile
GOAL is asking people from all over Tipperary to help them celebrate the 30th birthday of one of the country’s most popular annual fundraisers by organising a GOAL Mile somewhere in the county this Christmas.
Last year, GOAL Miles were scheduled to take place at two locations in Tipperary, but with this being a special anniversary year for the event, GOAL is hoping that even more people will get involved across the county – and the country in general.
This year will mark three decades since the first-ever staging of the Mile in 1982, when GOAL’s late chairperson and international athlete, Noel Carroll, came up with the idea to encourage people to run a mile at The Phoenix Park on Christmas morning for GOAL.
Much to everyone’s delight, more than 250 people turned up.
The event transferred to Belfield, UCD, the following year and the flagship GOAL Mile has been held there ever since. In the intervening 30 years, the event has grown substantially – the UCD Mile alone attracts an attendance in excess of 4,000 people each year – while it has also spread to many other locations throughout the country, and overseas to the UK and the US.
In all, a record 107 GOAL Miles were scheduled to take place over the festive and New Year period in 2010, and while the snow and ice forced the cancellation of the event in a number of locations, tens of thousands of people still managed to take part in more Miles last year than ever before, raising hundreds of thousands for GOAL’s various humanitarian programmes across the developing world.
If you would like to organise a Mile near you, email Karen at koshea@goal.ie or call GOAL at 01 – 2809 779 now.
