Month: May 2022

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CORA STAUNTON HAS been included in the 2021 AFLW Team of the year after another impressive campaign with the Greater Western Sydney [GWS] Giants.

The four-time All-Ireland winner is named among the forwards who made the shortlist, averaging 10.3 disposals, and kicking 10 goals for her club this year.

Staunton, 39, who first joined the Giants in 2017, has consistently been a standout performer since her move Down Under. She capped off her debut season by picking up the Giants’ Goal of the Year award.

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She then suffered a career-threatening triple-leg-break injury in 2019 but managed to make a full recovery the following season and has continued to make a vital contribution for the Giants.

The https://t.co/FJ7UMYhaFF Team of the Year has been settled 👏#AFLW

— AFL Women's (@aflwomens) April 6, 2021

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Dublin 6-15
Waterford 2-12

HANNAH TYRRELL MARKED her return to inter-county football in style this afternoon as the Irish rugby international hit 1-5, as reigning All-Ireland champions Dublin convincingly defeated Waterford in Parnell Park.

In a game that was dubbed a dress rehearsal for the championship, Dublin welcomed back Olwen Carey, Siobhan Killeen, and fresh from their endeavours in Australia, Lauren Magee and Niamh McEvoy.

Waterford did get off to a quicker start and dominated early possession, Maria Delahunty hit one from play and converted a free. Early Dublin efforts skimmed wide of the post but they opened their account for 2021 with a Sinead Aherne free after Niamh Hetherton was fouled. 

As Dublin upped the intensity, Tyrrell proved her worth hitting four first-half points. The first was a beautiful effort after a long range exchange with Niamh Hetherton, and Tyrrell was again on the scoresheet twice more minutes later.

Aherne converted her second free from 30 yards before Lyndsey Davey opened up a six-point gap when she found the net after a sweeping team move involved Hetherton and Siobhan Killeen.

Hetherton’s first-half efforts were rewarded with with a point of her own, while returning Killeen and Tyrrell also pointed leaving nine points between the teams at the water break, 1-8 to 0-2. 

Michelle Davoren of Dublin in action against Laura Mulcahy, left, and Rebecca Casey of Waterford.

Making her senior debut, Abby Shiels was comfortable in goals while Orlagh Nolan and Leah Caffrey bolstered a Dublin defence that proved difficult to break. 

Dublin’s second goal began as a sweeping team move down field and with Aherne in an inch of space, the captain offloaded to Hetherton, the Clontarf player made no mistake finishing to the net to open up a 12-point lead. 

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Waterford steadied their ship and Eimear Fennell (2) and Delahunty brought the Munster side back into contention. The teams traded scores before the break, with Aileen Wall finding space and Delahunty firing over from short range. However, a brace of Aherne frees ensured Dublin took a nine-point lead into half time, 2-10 to 0-7.

The third quarter was a tighter affair, although Dublin did have to cope with two separate yellow cards, Aoife Kane just before half-time and Caoimhe O’Connor before the second water break but it had little impact on the champions.

Aherne raised a green flag of her own when Hetherton found her in space and as the substitutions rolled in, the scoreboard continued to tick over. Aherne (3) and Tyrrell raised white flags while Delahunty and Kellyann Hogan converted for Waterford.

The game finished in a goal frenzy with five goals inside eight minutes. Orlagh Nolan and Tyrrell found the net for Dublin inside a minute, Aileen Wall and substitute Kate McGrath raised green flags for the visitors. Caoimhe O’Connor signed off on the win for Dublin when she converted from the penalty spot.

Scorers for Dublin: S Aherne 1-7 (0-5f), H Tyrrell 1-5, N Hetherton 1-1, O Nolan 1-0, L Davey 1-0, C O’Connor 1-0 (1-0 pen), L Collins 0-1, S Killeen 0-1.

Scorers for Waterford: M Delahunty 0-7 (0-4f), A Wall 1-1, K McGrath 1-0, E Fennell 0-2, C Fennell 0-1, K Hogan 0-1.

DUBLIN: A Shiels; O Nolan, L Caffrey, O Carey; M Byrne, A Kane, L Collins; L McGinley, H Tyrrell; C O’Connor, S McGrath, L Davey; N Hetherton, S Killeen, S Aherne (captain).

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Subs: H Leahy for M Byrne (28), M Davoren for N Hetherton (42), L Magee for S McGrath (45), H O’Neill for S Killeen (45), J Egan for S Aherne (48), N McEvoy for H Tyrell (52), L Kane for O Nolan (55), C McGuigan for L McGinley (55), S Loughran for L Davey (55).

WATERFORD: M Foran; A Mullaney, L Mulcahy, R Casey; C Fennell, K McGrath, M Wall (captain); C McGrath, M Dunford; R Tobin, A Wall, K Hogan; E Fennell, M Delahunty, K Murray.

Subs: K McGrath for R Tobin (39), A Murray for E Fennell (46), L Cusack for A Mullaney (49), B McMaugh for K Hogan (49), N Power for M Wall (56), C McCarthy for C Fennell (56), R Dunphy for A Wall (56). 

Referee: Kevin Phelan (Laois) 

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IN THE 50th minute of Sunday afternoon’s game, Páidí Fitzpatrick was summoned to the sideline at Semple Stadium.

The Clare defender gestured with his fist as he ran off, saluting David McInerney who was coming on as a replacement. The message was clear.

He had put in a huge shift to help establish a winning platform for his team as they were nine points clear.

Now the focus shifted to supporting the rest of the team as they attempted to finish the job.

Ultimately Clare were successful by four points. It was a victory to savour for their team to kick-start the 2021 ambitions but for Fitzpatrick it held a deeper meaning, this was an experience that he had waited some time to share in.

A first senior championship start for Clare at 30 years of age, seven weeks shy from his 31st birthday.

It was almost 13 years exactly, since he had previously started a championship game of any description for a Clare team.

On 25 June 2008 he featured in a Munster minor semi-final against Tipperary.

On 27 June 2021 he featured in a Munster senior quarter-final against Waterford.

It was a notable journey from one point to the other. His maiden competitive senior appearance for Clare arrived on Sunday 1 March last year. He acquitted himself well in a nine-point league win over Dublin in Ennis but any aspirations for channelling that momentum were soon wrecked. The country shut down 11 days later and the pandemic ripped up everyone’s plans.

Source: Bryan Keane/INPHO

Well done to Paidi Fitzpatrick who made his competitive debut for Clare in the National Hurling league versus Dublin in Ennis at the weekend. Joined by club mate Cathal Malone as the other wing back. #clareseniors #paidifitz #sixmilebridgegaa https://t.co/J9WwzPxMYT pic.twitter.com/CRAwWBSiRE

— Sixmilebridge (@SMBClare) March 2, 2020

When the 2020 inter-county programme of games resumed, Fitzpatrick made the bench for Clare’s four winter outings. He got pushed into the action in Portlaoise last November, a championship milestone arriving in the 60th minute of their triumph over Wexford.

2021 brought league starts against Wexford and Dublin before the big chance arrived on Sunday. He seized it, blotting out the threat of Waterford’s Jack Fagan to announce himself on the senior stage.

“It’s an amazing story,” admits Syl O’Connor, the Clare FM GAA commentator and Sixmilebridge club-mate of Fitzpatrick.

“Páidí would have been looked upon as one of the best man-markers in the county at club level. No question about that.

“Some of his greatest battles were marking Conor McGrath, when he was in his prime. The ‘Bridge and Cratloe were very prominent for a period, playing each other. Conor was one of the top players, Páidí always got the task of marking Conor.

“He probably has a unique style as well, he’s a real man-marker. He’d probably never run 100 yards and pop it over the bar. But the man that’s on him, won’t do that easily either.

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“He’s a massive player from the ‘Bridge point of view. Very influential and very well got with the team.”

Back in 2008 he moved from club underage ranks to fill the centre-back spot for the Clare minor hurlers in a team powered by the inside attacking duo of McGrath and Darach Honan. It was a campaign where they made a rousing start by beating Cork but were then knocked out by Tipperary.

Fitzpatrick was on the fringes of the county U21 squad in 2010 and 2011 without ever managing to break into the first fifteen.

Then followed a long spell away from the inter-county game yet his hurling never declined. He focused on his work with the club and prospered.

When Sixmilebridge lifted the Canon Hamilton Cup last September, it ensured Fitzpatrick would pick up his fifth Clare senior hurling medal since 2013. He had started in all five final wins, captaining them in 2017, while covering a range of positions including full-back, wing-back, midfield and centre-forward.

Source: Lorraine O’Sullivan/INPHO

In his homeplace they appreciated his worth as a golden age for the club was enjoyed.

“I’d often think of the example of Shane Prendergast in Kilkenny,” says O’Connor.

“Came in the first year and won the All-Ireland (in 2015), he was captain the next year for the All-Ireland and was gone the following year. He was 29 when he came in.

“Look, everybody would be surprised to see you make your senior championship debut at 30 years of age. There’s no doubt about that. But you’d have to look at it and say, how did that happen?

“I think he’s come into the scene now, based on the type of player that I believe Brian Lohan looks for. Big men and trying to get power into the team. Páidí has fallen into the category then of making his championship debut at 30 years of age.

“That half-back line is a massive unit with himself, John Conlon and Diarmuid Ryan. The size of Páidí is a big plus and his man-marking ability.”

Playing club hurling at an elite level gave him a strong grounding, to the fore for a dominant side in Clare, then testing himself in Munster against heavyweights like Na Piarsaigh and Ballygunner.

His older brother Stiofan was midfield on the Clare minor team that lifted the All-Ireland crown at the expense of Clare in 1997. His father PJ has been a club coach of renown in the county, a long-serving principal in Clonlara National School where he was one of the early influences in the hurling careers of current Clare stalwarts Colm Galvin and John Conlon.

Cathal McInerney and Páidí Fitzpatrick in the 2019 Clare county senior final.

Source: Lorraine O’Sullivan/INPHO

Fitzpatrick spent some time travelling as well, switching careers around 2016 from chartered accountancy to mobile and web development.

On the day of the 2019 All-Ireland hurling final, he was lining out at Treasure Island in San Francisco to help Na Fianna win the senior hurling final against the Tipperary club. Wolfe Tones player Rory Hayes was a team-mate that day, now they are both part of the Clare defensive unit.

And this week they’ve a Munster semi-final to prepare for.

Back in 2006, Munster’s U16 inter-divisional hurling tournament culminated with East Clare pipping Mid Tipperary by a point in the final. Páidí Fitzpatrick was on the winning side, Noel McGrath on the losing team. Given their general positioning, they’re likely to renew acquaintances on the pitch next Sunday.

McGrath’s inter-county career exploded to life after that game 15 years ago, Fitzpatrick’s has taken a bit longer to take flight.

“It’s unusual nowadays to be starting so late,” admits O’Connor.

“But then again there’s nothing unusual nowadays about a fella blazing a trail of glory at 18 or 19 and then he’s gone. Maybe for a change, it’ll go the other way for a while.

“He stuck at it. The worst thing you can do is stand beside Páid Fitzpatrick, you’d only be looking up at him. He’s a massive lad.

“And if there’s a job to be done on the hurling pitch, he’ll do it.”

– First published 06.00, 29 June

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MORE IRISH PLAYERS have earned new Australian Football League Women’s [AFLW] contracts as the focus switches to next season.

Mayo and Cavan stars Sarah Rowe and Aishling Sheridan have committed their immediate future to Collingwood, putting pen to paper in recent days.

Yesterday, Rowe was one of six players to have a new deal announced, signing on until 2023. The 25-year-old recently completed her third AFLW campaign, playing seven goals across an injury-hampered season, while kicking one goal.

Having undergone shoulder surgery as the curtain came down on the 2021 season, Rowe stayed on in Australia to rehabilitate, missing the Green and Red’s league campaign. The Kilmoremoy forward returned to home soil in recent days, though, so the race is now on for her championship involvement.

Her immediate focus will be on Gaelic games matters, though her new two-year deal will see her head back Down Under afterwards to continue to “live the best of both worlds,” as she so often says.

Sheridan’s status of being on a two-year deal was also confirmed this morning, as she officially penned a contract extension until 2023.

The Mullahoran ace lit up the AFLW last season, enjoying a stunning individual campaign with goals almost every week as she established herself as one of the Pies’ main forwards in her second year at the club.

24-year-old Sheridan has been back in Ireland for some time now, returning to inter-county duty with Cavan through their Division 2 league campaign, as they now prepare for an Ulster championship meeting with Donegal.

Elsewhere, Rowe’s Mayo countywoman Aileen Gilroy has re-signed for North Melbourne.

Gilroy in action for North Melbourne.

Source: AAP/PA Images

One of 24 players retained from the Kangaroos 30-strong 2021 AFLW list, Gilroy sparkled once again in her second season and has subsequently been rewarded with a longer stay.

The 28-year-old has excelled in Australia of late and has been touted as “one of the most exciting Irish talents” over there, though has opted out of the Mayo ladies football set-up for 2021. 

A former underage soccer international with Ireland, the Killala native missed most of the 2019 ladies football season with a devastating cruciate injury, before announcing her comeback with a stellar debut season Down Under.

She returned to line out in the Green and Red’s midfield last autumn, but has decided against it this time around.

“Aileen’s not one to half-arse anything,” as manager Michael Moyles recently said. “The last year or two, she’s struggled with it so she needs to take a year to get things around her. And that’s fine, no problem.”

  • Tipp’s Premiership champion O’Dwyer among Irish stars returning to AFLW next season 

Tipperary’s Premiership champion Orla O’Dwyer, Melbourne’s Dublin duo Sinéad Goldrick and Lauren Magee, and Adelaide Crows’ Ailish Considine have all had their respective returns for the 2021/22 season confirmed in recent days, with further announcements expected.

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The42 understands that several other Irish players — 14 were involved in the 2021 season — are on two-year contracts, and will return for another campaign. 

The league is set to expand over the coming seasons, with the 2022 edition — season six –  due to begin in December 2021 and the Grand Final to be held in mid-March, before the men’s season begins. The competition will increase from nine rounds to 10, plus three weeks of finals.

Over the past few years, the AFLW campaign opened in late January and ran until mid-April, allowing for the Irish contingent — much of whom play inter-county ladies football — to return to these shores for the tail end of the league and for the entire TG4 All-Ireland championship.

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Covid-hit 2020 aside, they normally travelled Down Under in October/November for pre-season, so it’s expected that will be earlier this coming autumn, throwing up the potential of code clashes.

REIGNING CORK SENIOR hurling kingpins Blackrock will take on last year’s semi-finalists Erins Own after this evening’s draw for the 2021 club championships in the county.

On the day that adult club players received the green light to resume training in pods of 15 from Monday 10 May and can play games from Monday 7 June, the championship draws for the year ahead took place in Cork.

In the hurling Blackrock, who ended an 18-year wait last October for senior hurling glory, will meet Erins Own along with city rivals St Finbarr’s and last year’s senior A winners Charleville in their group.

Last year’s beaten finalists Glen Rovers will take on Douglas, Newtownshandrum, Bishopstown.

The remaining group will feature the East Cork trio of Sarsfields, Midleton and Carrigtwohill – who won five counties between them in the 2010-2014 period – and city team Na Piarsaigh.

In the football, last year’s premier senior final is still to be played but the two sides in contention, Castlehaven and Nemo Rangers, do know who they will take on in the group stages this year.

Castlehaven will meet fellow West Cork teams Carbery Rangers and Newcestown, along with the winners of the senior A final involving Éire Óg and Mallow, that is still an outstanding fixture.

Nemo Rangers will face Valley Rovers, Douglas and Carrigaline. Then it’s 2018 champions St Finbarr’s up against Ballincollig, Clonakilty and Ilen Rovers in the remaining group.

2021 Cork Championship Draws

Premier Senior Football

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  • Group A – Nemo Rangers, Valley Rovers, Douglas, Carrigaline.
  • Group B – Castlehaven, Newcestown, Carbery Rangers, Mallow/Éire Óg.
  • Group C – St Finbarr’s, Ballincollig, Clonakilty, Ilen Rovers.

Premier Senior Hurling

  • Group A – Glen Rovers, Douglas, Newtownshandrum, Bishopstown.
  • Group B – Sarsfields, Na Piarsaigh, Midleton, Carrigtwohill.
  • Group C – Blackrock, Erins Own, St Finbarr’s, Charleville.
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Senior A Football

  • Group A – O’Donovan Rossa, Bandon, Béal Áth An Ghaorthaidh, Dohenys.
  • Group B – Bishopstown, St Michael’s, Kiskeam, Winner Knocknagree/Kanturk. 
  • Group C – Fermoy, Loser Mallow/Éire Óg, Clyda Rovers, Bantry Blues.

Senior A Hurling

  • Group A – Kanturk, Bandon, Fermoy, Blarney. 
  • Group B – Ballyhea, Bride Rovers, Ballymartle, Mallow. 
  • Group C – Fr O’Neill’s, Newcestown, Cloyne, Killeagh. 

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IN THE WEEKS building up to the 1997 All-Ireland football final, as the stream of messages John Casey was receiving turned into a deluge, one piece of correspondence stood out.

The Mayo forward was gearing up to face Kerry, where he had been located over the previous twelve months, educating himself on the football fields and in the lecture halls.
One of his colleagues from college reached out from across the Atlantic.

“We got to the All-Ireland against Kerry, and I was playing five of my Tralee team-mates. Then a postcard arrived from Chicago before the game. I told PJ I was always going to let this out.

“He wasn’t even a Galway player at the time, but he says, ‘JC, best of luck, ye deserve an All-Ireland, I hope ye win it. Ye’d better this year because you can take it, I’m going to take Ireland by storm next year.’

“That was Padraic Joyce in ’97 and we all know what happened in ’98.”

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Source: Keith Heneghan/INPHO

By then Casey knew all about Joyce’s football talent. In the autumn of 1996, he hadn’t received that advance warning.

Word reached Casey about the prospect of heading to Tralee on a football scholarship.

“I remember Val (Andrews, Tralee coach) saying, you’re going to be living in a house with footballers from Galway and he said their names.

“I would have played underage against a Galway footballer called Padraic Boyce. I was late going down to Tralee because we drew with Meath in the All-Ireland and I wasn’t going down to college for a couple of weeks and then coming back trying to prepare for the replay. 

“I remember being dropped off at this house, it was owned by a judge in Tralee. I walked in and all these fellas were waiting to see this Mayo fella. I’m looking around going, ‘Where the hell is Padraic Boyce?’

“Little did I know it was Padraic Joyce. So that was my first time ever setting eyes on PJ. We have remained firm friends since.

“I soon got to know all about him. I remember myself and (Seamus) Moynihan doing a piece for TV before the Sigerson weekend in 1997. Moynihan said to the camera, ‘I’m sure John is absolutely delighted Padraic Joyce isn’t involved with Galway.’

“I’m kind of going, ‘Shut up, in case they get any ideas!’ “

Mayo’s John Casey.

Source: Lorraine O’Sullivan/INPHO

Joyce was not the only one to use the competition as a springboard to sporting stardom.
It’s 25 years since that milestone win, the first time the Sigerson Cup had been brought back to Kerry after years being the preserve of the university ruling class. They operated as Tralee RTC in 1997, IT Tralee for the following two years and the outcome was the same. Champions. No college has done three-in-a-row since.

Tonight the current vintage, under a new label as MTU Kerry, take to the field in Rathkeale, the first time a Tralee outfit has reached the Sigerson Cup semi-finals since that golden era of the late ‘90s.

The bar was set high by their predecessors.

A group of Gaelic football galacticos from around the country and moulded together to form a dominant force.

*****

Consider the roll call of names. Tralee’s first Sigerson team in 1996 saw Joyce joined by Meath’s Mark O’Reilly and the Kerry pair of William Kirby and Gene Farrell.

In 1997 they were joined by the Kerry pair of Barry O’Shea and Seamus Moynihan, and Casey. 1998 brought Mike Frank Russell, Damien Hendy, Michael Donnellan and Jim McGuinness into the reckoning. The 1999 title was achieved without the suspended Joyce but included the Laois pair of Noel Garvan and Colm Parkinson, and Kerry’s Noel Kennelly.

Seamus Moynihan and Noel Garvan.

Source: Lorraine O’Sullivan/INPHO

A core of future senior county class was always anchoring their challenge. There was also promising local fowards – Pa O’Sullivan, Jack Ferriter, Jack Dennehy and Johnny McGlynn.

They wasted little time making their mark afterwards, becoming dominant figures in the county game. Joyce, Moynihan and Donnellan all claimed 3 All-Stars apiece and were Texaco Footballer of the Year winners between 1998 and 2001. O’Reilly, Moynihan and Joyce ensured that a Tralee alumnus picked up the All-Ireland man-of-the-match award each year between 1999 and 2001.

“It was just a great bunch of lads,” says Val Andrews, the Dubliner in charge on the sideline.

Val Andrews.

Source: Andrew Paton/INPHO

“We had our up and downs but they all enjoyed it. It was great for the college, the town, the lads and myself.

“You’d always look back with fondness. The first Sigerson game in Tralee, against Maynooth in 1996 and 3,000 people there in Austin Stack Park on a Wednesday.

“Ah Kerry is great, it was fabulous times.”

Life brought Andrews to Tralee in late 1993 as a lecturer. A move to North Kerry may not have been mapped out but when it did, he figured after an initial period of apprehension that it was best to immerse himself in the local sporting culture.

“A Dublin Northsider from Ballymun Kickhams hits Tralee. I’d be straight, I was sort of in awe going to Kerry. All-Ireland medals everywhere. I never envisaged that there’d be Ballymun fellas walking around with seven or eight All-Ireland medals now. It’s amazing the way things can go.

“Going down, I thought I’d learn from these boys. When I joined the college in ’93, it was Division 2 team and we didn’t have a set of jerseys. That’s where it started. It was the home of football, I was thinking we could surely do something here.”

A good trainer came on board. Pat Flanagan was taking his first steps in a GAA journey that would catapult him into an All-Ireland winning role alongside Jack O’Connor.

“John Kelleher came in as a full-time GAA Officer, that was key, Pat Flanagan then joined the Health & Leisure department. I knew him first as this fella from Waterford, who was a sprinter. I was thinking what use was that to us?

“But he was absolutely key in advancing everybody’s knowledge of how to train teams. Sure, he went on to huge things but he always laughs at that first introduction. An exceptional trainer, I learned so much from him. I think the only thing he got from me was madness.”

Andrews had been happy to take early morning training sessions with the Ballymun minors before he went to school, organising football at sunrise in Tralee was a natural step.

Flanagan introduced weight training and methods targeting improvements in speed and endurance. He showed the worth of training camps, once a year they would head off somewhere for a Friday night session, three on a Saturday and one on a Sunday morning. 

“A lot of this stuff is just about bonding really,” says Andrews.

“You know the Kung Fu Panda thing, the secret is there is no secret. You get myths, if you win one, sure all the talk is they were training 700 times a year.

“You couldn’t do the training we were doing unless you were as skilled as Flanagan.”

Different structures supported their football project. A new Health and Leisure course attracted more football players. Bill Kennedy from the local Lee Strand Co-Op was a strong sponsor, looking after some apartments to house footballers. The college provided a few football scholarships. In that maiden Sigerson voyage of 1996, they lost out to a UCD team powered by Trevor Giles, Brian Dooher and Derek Savage.

They learned and rebounded. Defeated UL in Coleraine in 1997, Jordanstown in Tralee in 1998 and Garda College in Belfast in 1999.

Three-in-a-row completed.

“Bill Kennedy was an absolute cornerstone to the whole thing,” says Andrews.

“Put faith in a fella he could barely understand his English! Everybody was saying we were breaking the rules. We didn’t. I was a Civil Servant working in the Department of Education, rules and regulations are something I’m good at.

“Some lads weren’t the greatest students but sure a lot of students are like that, it’s not just because they’re footballers.”

*****

The best talent that they possessed?

“If I was to pick, I’d probably go for Joyce,” says Jack Ferriter, the Dingle native that was Player of the Tournament in 1998.

20 years since Kerry last won a All-Ireland Minor. Jack Ferriter was captain in '94 #famine
@NuachtTG4 @gaa pic.twitter.com/fw93ctgGzJ

— Seán Mac an tSíthigh (@Buailtin) September 17, 2014

 

“He’d be in the top three I’d have played with. Just everything about him, possession of the ball, spraying kicks, kicking points. An all-round leader. Michael Donnellan then would be different, he was probably the fastest player I ever played with. We actually beat Galway in the minor final in ’94 so I would have known these boys before I came to Tralee in ’98.”

Source: Patrick Bolger/INPHO

“If you were to say one player that changed the course of history in Tralee, it was Seamus Moynihan,” reckons Andrews.

“An absolute legend of a footballer. He got us over the line.

“Joyce was a fabulously talented footballer. Would often tell you about fellas that we wouldn’t know of, he was tactically aware. The next big scholarship was Michael Donnellan. Really special talent. Have huge time for that man.”

Casey concurs in the endorsement of Moynihan’s football prowess.

“I’m leaving Mayo players out of the debate, but he was the best player I ever played with.

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“Seamus, the Pony, is your Rolls Royce. The ball was like a magnet to him, he just seemed to know where everything was going to land. Lovely, quiet, unassuming fella but Jesus Christ above, put him in between the lines and don’t cross him. But a brilliant, brilliant fella.

“Seamus was in a car accident two weeks before that Sigerson weekend (in 1997), he wasn’t able to start the semi-final against Sligo. He had two things rammed up his nose because his nose hadn’t stopped bleeding.

“We were taking on a bit of water against Sligo and we had to bring on Moynihan to steady the ship and he did.”

Padraic Joyce and Seamus Moynihan in the 2000 All-Ireland football final.

Source: Lorraine O’Sullivan/INPHO

*****

The future impact of that Class of Tralee has not just been restricted to the playing sphere.

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It is 30 years since Jim McGuinness was a teenage squad member as Donegal smashed through the barrier to lift Sam.

Source: Patrick Bolger/INPHO

It is 10 years since he replicated that feat as a manager, a more profound achievement that reverberated around the Gaelic football landscape.

He sat his Leaving Cert at the age of 24 and then the Glenties native journeyed down the west coast to enrol for a sports studies diploma, curious to discover more about the rhythms of football in Kerry.

“I lived with Jimmy in Tralee for three years and Colm Parkinson as well,” says Ferriter.

“We’d a house down around Castle Street. The thing I’d say about him football wise is he only had one leg, the left leg all the time! But he was a great warrior in fairness, high fitness levels, a great character overall.

“He used to go back up to Donegal twice a month, but he often came back down to Dingle to us as well, we used to go out on the town at the weekend. He’s progressed a lot with his sporting career, you could see the potential in him.”

“He took his football seriously, a nice lad to deal with,” recalls Andrews.

“Jimmy, God love him, had lost his two brothers. He’d plenty stuff going on. He’s done exceptionally well, they’re two big things to be dealing with.

“Would I have seen him being the manager that he has become? Probably, no. Now don’t get me wrong, he was a great student of the game. But you wouldn’t know whether fellas would go into management.

“He was certainly bright enough. With the 1999 team, he was really leading then. Joyce was sent-off that year and couldn’t play, so that three-in-a-row was a huge achievement and Jimmy was central.”

Jim McGuinness celebrates Donegal’s 2012 All-Ireland final win.

Source: Morgan Treacy/INPHO

*****

Casey only spent that single year in Tralee, studying Business Information Technology.

It was a slice of novelty at a time when his football life was consumed by Mayo’s efforts to reach the national peak. He was required him to park rivalries from county games.

“When I went down there, people were wondering how myself and Mark O’Reilly would greet each other. They were after beating us in the All-Ireland, I got the head knocked off me in that final. It was almost like a big meeting when we met each other.

“But Mark was a fine footballer, we were both in the half-forward line actually with PJ.

“We both left after ’97 and they replaced us with kind of two inferior players…Michael Donnellan and Jim McGuinness!”

Mark O’Reilly in action against Jason Sherlock in 1999.

Source: Patrick Bolger/INPHO

Casey lived with Joyce and the Cloherty brothers from Carna, Michael and Seamus. That Galway crew were his companions for road trips in a time before bypasses as they ploughed through the main streets of country towns choked with traffic.

“I found the commute brutal. I’d a little Ford Fiesta car, £20 in diesel used to get me from Charlestown to Tralee, and back home again.

“After county league games, I used to get a lift back with the Mayo crowd to Charlestown, have an hour getting my stuff together and then head for Tralee. I used to be falling asleep in the car by Newcastlewest but the only thing is Joyce would keep me awake.

“In Charlestown, our business here in town is right on the main N17 road. After I left Tralee I’d look out on any given Friday or Sunday evening, and who would I see but the long, straggy, curly hair and the smig, sitting in the bus – Jim McGuinness, doing the commute. He’d give a big wave out the window if he was passing the shop here.”

“It was tough going but I’ve great memories from it all. I remember Val saying to me after the 1997 final, ‘I’m glad we brought you down. You had a good weekend JC.’

“It meant a lot. If a fella goes on a scholarship, you’re under pressure to perform.”

*****

It was a time that shaped football identities. In Ferriter’s case, it almost nudged him to another part of the country.

“I probably was the only one in the forwards not starting inter-county games. I was on the Kerry panel for years but I found it hard to break through ahead of Maurice Fitz and all these fellas.

“Val approached me when he left Tralee to go to Cavan, he was manager there. I wasn’t getting much game time with Kerry. I was very close to moving. I ended up training for a weekend with them.

“Just last minute I pulled out, I didn’t bother with it. But that’s the influence Val had on me, he was great.”

He stayed closer to home and when he did move, it was nearby to Cork, where he played county finals for Bishopstown, and is still based on Leeside.

“I’ve great memories of Tralee. Got my sports course out of it, still doing that in the Radisson Hotel here in Cork, as a personal trainer in the gym and working in the spa.

“You build up great relationships with players. Like Cork are playing Galway now in the league in a few weeks, so I’ll meet up with Padraic Joyce after the game. I think that’s still the same. Like you’ve Sean Powter and David Clifford together with UL, they’ll be tearing skelps off each other in a few months.

“I was lucky to have my time in Tralee. Great scenes around the college, nights out, back to Dingle with the Sigerson Cup, up to Galway one weekend as well. It was a great old buzz.”

*****

By the culmination of the last Sigerson win, Andrews had returned to Dublin. He passed the managerial baton on to a trio of Vinny O’Shea from Portmagee, Alan Ringland from Belfast and Fr. Pat O’Donnell from Ballymacelligott.

One game stands out from his time. The 1998 decider against a UUJ team spearheaded by the McEntees of Armagh and Derry’s Sean Marty Lockhart.

Their forward Gene Farrell from Annascaul, who now lectures in computing in Tralee, made his mark.

Source: © Tom HonanINPHO

“The one I derived the most satisfaction from. We were innovative, we stayed in Killarney because we knew all the other teams that weekend would be staying together, so we said we’ll mirror that.

“Gene Farrell was injured in the semi-final, couldn’t play in the final. He was standing beside me for the first half, not togged out at all.

“UUJ were the better team and things were going bad. Gene said to put him on, I was thinking in my own head that I would, he was a bit of a legend, the team and the crowd would get a lift. He ran into the full-forward line and scored the point to level the game.

“Then McGuinness got the ball on the non-stand side in Tralee, I’m shouting not to shoot because I thought the angle was stupid. He kicked it anyway and it went straight over the black spot.

“Showed how much I knew about football,” laughs Andrews.

*****

The 2022 Tralee team has a more local feel to it. Aidan O’Mahony is the manager, 14 of the starting team are Kerry players, Tipperary defender Dean Carew the exception.

Their ambition is similar to land a medal that they will cherish.

“The whole team stopped in Charlestown on the way back when we won in ’97,” recalls Casey.

“There was blue peaked caps at the time with Tralee RTC, there’s a picture of my mother and Padraic Joyce in the living room from that time, she still has the cap. 

“As a person that never got their hands on that elusive Celtic Cross, it’s probably apart from a few Connacht medals, all I’d really have to show for it. I was only messaging Barry O’Shea last week, we were saying we couldn’t believe it was 25 years.

“I think the thing a lot of people would say is you now meet the likes of PJ or Barry or any of that team who have All-Irelands, there’s no mention of those medals, it’s the friendships you make from it and the memories.

“It was a very special time.”

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Why Rep. Paul Gosar’s censure matters

May 17, 2022 | News | No Comments

The House on Wednesday voted 223-207 to censure Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ), more than a week after he posted an animated video edited to depict him killing Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and brandishing weapons at President Joe Biden.

Following the censure, Gosar will be forced to stand in the middle of the House chamber as a statement condemning his actions is read to him in front of all the members. Additionally, he’ll lose his committee assignments, including seats on the Oversight Committee and the Natural Resources Committee, a penalty Democrats also included in this resolution.

Gosar’s censure — the second most severe punishment a House member can receive, after expulsion — is significant for several reasons. In addition to doling out a public rebuke, it sends an important message against violent rhetoric, which in politics is often disproportionately targeted toward women of color. The loss of committee seats in particular is notable: It’s through them that lawmakers are able to weigh in on policy and conduct government oversight — and without them, they have little power.

“We cannot have members joking about murdering each other, as well as threatening the president of the United States,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said earlier this week.

While Democrats have broadly condemned Gosar’s actions, Republican leadership has shied away from issuing any outright criticism. “I called him when I heard about the video, and he made a statement that he doesn’t support violence, and he took the video down,” House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy said in a CNN interview.

Gosar has removed the video following significant backlash, and issued a statement saying he does not “espouse violence or harm towards any Member of Congress or Mr. Biden,” but he hasn’t apologized.

Democrats hope the censure vote on Wednesday serves as an explicit condemnation of Gosar’s post, and draws a line regarding the type of behavior lawmakers are willing to accept. Violent language by members has become an especially sensitive issue after the January 6 insurrection highlighted how speeches encouraging violence could translate to real-world deaths.

“When Republicans don’t condemn death threats against their colleagues … it sends a message to the public that these threats are condoned,” said Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA) in a Wednesday floor speech. This resolution “reinforces that this behavior will not be tolerated.”

Why the censure vote matters

The censure vote sets an important precedent for how Congress responds to the sorts of statements about violence some Republican lawmakers have become increasingly comfortable making.

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It’s quite rare for the House to actually censure a member: The lower chamber has only done it 23 times before, the last time being in 2010 when then-Rep. Charlie Rangel was censured for ethics violations related to financial misconduct. More recently, the House has voted to strip Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) of her committee assignments after she supported comments calling for violence toward Democrats.

Censure, reprimand, and expulsion are different ways the House can penalize members. Censure and reprimand only require a simple majority in the House, which Democrats possess, while expulsion requires a two-thirds majority.

If a member is censured or reprimanded, they’re able to retain their seat. Unlike a censure, reprimand does not include what’s effectively a public admonishing.

In the past, lawmakers have sometimes been subject to reviews by an ethics committee before a censure vote — something that Democrats have bypassed in Gosar’s case because of how clear-cut his actions have been, according to Rep. Ted Deutch (D-FL).

“There are no open factual questions here for the Ethics Committee to resolve, nor any unresolved questions of intent,” Deutch, the chair of the Ethics Committee, said in floor remarks. “It’s clear from the video, and from Representative Gosar’s public comments minimizing it, that censure is appropriate.”

Democrats emphasize that this censure vote is necessary to underscore their condemnation of violence in politics, especially after the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6. Additionally, they note that it’s vital to highlight that violence toward women, including lawmakers of color who are often the targets of extreme abuse, is unacceptable.

“As the events of January 6th have shown, such vicious and vulgar messaging can and does foment actual violence,” a group of Democratic lawmakers who introduced the censure resolution said in a statement. “Violence against women in politics is a global phenomenon meant to silence women and discourage them from seeking positions of authority and participating in public life, with women of color disproportionately impacted. Minority Leader McCarthy’s silence is tacit approval and just as dangerous.”

Censure is the least the House can do

The censure resolution — specifically provisions that will remove Gosar from his committee assignments — will have concrete effects, including limiting his impact on hearings and policy those panels work on.

In the past, lawmakers who’ve lost these assignments have been left scrambling to figure out other ways they can influence legislation and advance positions they hold. Now-former Rep. Chris Collins, who lost his committee assignments in 2018, told Politico that he would focus his energies on more constituent engagement and participation in different caucuses.

“They basically have nothing to do,” Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) told the publication when he was asked about lawmakers who were booted from committees. “If you’re cast out of the organized bodies and committees of Congress, and you’re kind of just a hitchhiker on the floor, there’s very little influence you can have in the House of Representatives.”

Multiple Democrats have also argued that Gosar’s actions are grounds for expulsion given the depictions of violence the video contains. “When someone sends out a tweet or any other illustration of him or her murdering somebody on the House floor … that person should not even be a member of this body,” Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-SC) told CNN.

Reaching the two-thirds vote threshold for expulsion, however, would likely be tough given Democrats’ narrow majority. Advancing a vote like that would take around 290 votes in the House, meaning dozens of Republicans would have to join the 221-member Democratic caucus to pass it. That would probably be a long shot since Reps. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger are the only two Republicans who backed the censure resolution. (Previously, 11 Republicans voted to strip Greene of her committee assignments.)

Many Republicans’ unwillingness to condemn one of their own members suggests that censure is likely the most severe consequence Gosar will face for now.

“Threatening the life of a colleague is grounds for expulsion,” Ocasio-Cortez told reporters on Tuesday. “But given the Republican Party — especially the leader — is too cowardly to really enforce any standard of conduct … censure and committee removal is the next most appropriate step.”

All 23 Pixar movies, definitively ranked

May 16, 2022 | News | No Comments

Since the release of its very first feature film, Toy Story, in 1995, Pixar has become one of Hollywood’s most celebrated animation studios. Ranging from superhero adventures to tales of a lonely robot on a post-apocalyptic Earth, the studio’s 23 movies to date have earned plaudits for being artistically adventurous and telling stories ostensibly aimed at kids that have just as many adult fans. Even Pixar’s lesser works usually have something to offer.

2020 has been a big year for Pixar, which had two new films come out, even with the movie business ravaged by a pandemic. The first one, Onward, which came to theaters briefly on March 5, is the tale of a pair of brothers on a quest, set in a fantasy world in which magic has been slowly drained away. The second, the jazz-driven adventure Soul, was delayed several times before its Christmas Day debut on Disney+. These came on the heels of the Oscar-winning Toy Story 4, which most likely brought an end to the studio’s most well-known franchise after 24 years.

And what better to do in a two-Pixar year than rank all of the Pixar movies from worst to best? So that’s just what the Vox Culture team has done; you’ll find our definitive standings below.

23. Cars 2 (2011)

The worst thing about Cars 2, even worse than the fact that it is 106 minutes of Larry the Cable Guy doing his unfunny Larry the Cable Guy shtick against a backdrop of borderline offensive clichés and regional stereotypes, is that the animation is frequently dazzling. It’s flashy, colorful, full of intricate and eye-pleasing detail, and far, far lovelier than this terrible movie deserves.

The first Cars movie was a tired story about a cocky race car who needs to learn humility from a bunch of small-town yokels, but it still managed to deliver at least some charm and character variety. In contrast, Cars 2 puts all of its energy into a bafflingly insipid mistaken-identity spy plot, entirely centered on Larry the Cable Guy, a.k.a. Mater. It’s North by Northwest by Hee-Haw, and no matter how hard you wish for it, there is no reprieve; Larry the Cable Guy keeps being in the movie, and the movie keeps happening, and the movie is 106 minutes long.

Here is a list of other movies that are 106 minutes long: Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief, Gremlins, D2: The Mighty Ducks, Whiplash, Fright Night, Lars and the Real Girl, Something’s Gotta Give, The Lego Movie 2, Halloween (2018). None of them contain uncomfortably long bidet gags, or references to “pains in my undercarriage,” or a scene where Larry the Cable Guy’s talking tow truck character pees himself in public. This makes them all five-star movies by comparison; highly recommended. —Aja Romano

22. Cars 3 (2017)

For a movie that largely exists to allow Disney’s merchandising arm to create more toys, Cars 3 is better than it has to be. Like the other Cars movies, its world-building feels especially half-assed (unless you assume it’s the post-apocalyptic tale of a world where sentient cars have killed all humans). But unlike the first two movies, it’s a surprisingly involved story about aging, the dismantling of white male privilege, and our coming artificial intelligence-dominated future.

Befitting its characters, Cars 3 feels more assembled than gracefully created, and its distinctly episodic nature holds it back. But it’s the rare movie whose protagonist learns that winning at all costs isn’t the only thing. Consider it the computer-animated version of a classic sports film like Bull Durham.Emily VanDerWerff

21. The Good Dinosaur (2015)

Even now, five years after its release, The Good Dinosaur can make a claim to being the most beautiful Pixar movie. Its photorealistic backdrops provide a gorgeous canvas for a story of a talking dinosaur and a silent human child trying to make their way across the American West to the dinosaur’s home.

The problem stems from how obvious it is that the story is cobbled together from the elements of other, better stories. Pixar made its name by taking wild scenarios that could only happen in animation — toys wake up, bugs have a secret society, there are monsters in the closet, etc. — and grounding them in old-fashioned, classic Hollywood storytelling. But The Good Dinosaur (which went through a tumultuous production process) doesn’t have much to add to the old tropes it’s updating. —EV

20. Cars (2006)

My 2-year-old nephew’s favorite movie — before he saw Toy Story, that is — was Cars. But then he saw Toy Story and he stopped talking about Cars (to my brother’s chagrin, since my brother loves cars, and Cars). I have to side with my nephew on this one. Cars is an absolutely fine movie, and it has a sweet affection for small-town, forgotten life by way of Radiator Springs. But Cars fails to match the ambition of some of its Pixar cousins, instead coming across as relaxed to the point of low stakes. And once you’ve seen any one of the studio’s other films, your love for Cars will most likely become but a passing phase. —Alex Abad-Santos

19. Onward (2020)

Onward takes place in a world that was once enchanted, but where the magic has faded away. The plot cleverly employs the structure of a campaign you might play in a fantasy role-playing game such as Dungeons & Dragons, with heroes, a quest, a number of obstacles and monsters, puzzles, spells, and some surprises thrown in here and there. The Tolkien-lite elements are mixed with more banal workaday realities. Set in a world populated by creatures like elves and centaurs and cyclopes — who live in the suburbs, where stray unicorns sometimes paw through the garbage — it’s both magical and hilariously ordinary.

Written and directed by Monsters University’s Dan Scanlon, Onward is gentle and fun. No, it’s not top-tier Pixar. But it’s better than most of the entertainment aimed at children that studios churn out these days. It doesn’t move at a frantic pace. It isn’t loud and grating or reliant on musical numbers that will eventually drive loving parents out of their ever-loving minds. It’s just a movie that has a big organizing concept — and it’s also got a heart. Onward gives a glimpse of Pixar’s likely future, but it still retains a spark of that old-time Pixar magic. —Alissa Wilkinson

18. Finding Dory (2016)

Over the years, Pixar — or more specifically director-screenwriter Andrew Stanton — has perfected the basic studio sequel formula of repeating the previous movie’s plot without making it feel like more of the same. Prime example: Finding Dory doesn’t have much to add to the original story of Finding Nemo, but it does have the great reveal that Dory really can talk to whales! Yes, that’s a small way to move things forward, but a fun one nonetheless.

The themes at the heart of Finding Nemo are still present in this film; there’s still an emphasis on the importance of found family, the unique challenges and delights of navigating life with a neuroatypical brain, and the vast and stunning splendor of the ocean. But Finding Dory diminishes Nemo’s philosophy of perseverance and communal kindness a bit, drowned out by a plot whose daring rescues frequently verge into the extravagant and often undermine the urgency of Dory’s quest to find her parents. That said, it’s still a fun kids’ movie, it’s still Pixar, and wow, the ocean: pretty cool, huh? —AR

17. A Bug’s Life (1998)

A Bug’s Life is something of a sophomore slump for Pixar. The studio’s follow-up to Toy Story was one of two animated movies about insects to hit theaters within months of each other, dampening some of the excitement around it. (The movie’s competitor, Dreamworks’ Antz, came out first.) That was a strange move on both studios’ parts: Ants and grasshoppers aren’t the most endearing or marketable main characters. But few (if any) of the characters from A Bug’s Life are likely to rank among Pixar fans’ favorites.

The film culls from an old Aesop fable, The Ant and the Grasshopper, to tell a story that feels much folkier than Pixar’s more modern fare: Flik is an inventor who wants to help save his home from invading grasshoppers in an effort to prove his worth to his suspicious neighbors. Instead of recruiting real fighters, he collects a traveling circus group of other bugs and tries to pass them off as the saviors his fellow ants are looking for … an amusing premise, but ultimately not one that really sticks.

There’s still some value in watching A Bug’s Life, if only just to see how much Pixar’s animation and storytelling have evolved in the years since. And the movie does have some unique touches, like an explicitly romantic ending and a villain, the terrifying Hopper, that straight-up dies. Otherwise, A Bug’s Life is but a quirky footnote in Pixar’s catalog. —Allegra Frank

16. Monsters University (2013)

One of Pixar’s lesser follow-ups is this college-set prequel, which fails to leave as much of an impression as the film it’s based on. Mike Wazowski and his future BFF James P. “Sulley” Sullivan are college freshmen who, as we know from Monsters Inc., are about to become lifelong pals. The stakes are low as a result, and in the end, it’s not all that interesting or exciting to watch their friendship develop. The college setting doesn’t really expand on the world of Monsters Inc., and watching these characters flail as their younger selves hardly adds to a story already defined best by its humor.

To the movie’s credit, there is a nice theme of learning to make peace with yourself when you fall short of achieving your dreams. Mike wants to be an accomplished scarer of humans, just like Sulley is — and again, we already know that isn’t to be. But when he realizes it’s not quite in the cards for him, he chases another passion instead. It’s not necessarily the most uplifting message from Pixar, but it plays out nicely (and realistically) enough. —AF

15. Brave (2012)

It felt, and in a way still feels, like so much was riding on Brave: It was Pixar’s first female-driven film, the first film with a girl as the hero, the first film with a woman as director. But Brenda Chapman, presiding over a depressingly gender-imbalanced art production team, found herself abruptly replaced in the director’s chair, on the orders of a CEO who later resigned from Pixar following allegations of sexual misconduct and accusations of “open sexism” that referenced Chapman’s firing.

Did Brave manage, then, to live up to expectations despite that production hurdle? I vote yes: Brave, by Pixar standards of excellence, is a delight. You feel the lovingly detailed animation in every curl on Princess Merida’s head, in every stitch of each intricate wall tapestry. Its story, about a fiery Scottish lass whose desire to fight and hunt like her father inadvertently leads her mother to be cursed and transfigured into a bear, is as interesting as the studio’s best. Its stakes — the restoration of Merida’s family and, oh, just her lifelong happiness and ability to be treated with respect in a violently patriarchal society — are as high as ever.

The plot isn’t as tightly wound as those of other, more highly regarded Pixar films, but that’s just fine. Brave takes its time reinforcing its emotional connections, lingering on the bond between Merida and her mom, and building Merida into one of Pixar’s most fully realized characters. Brave did everything the boys’ movies did, and it did it backward, in high heels, while frequently fending off inappropriate workplace behavior. If you want a better movie, well, here’s what you can do. —AR

14. Monsters Inc. (2001)

Remember how Monsters Inc. lost the first-ever Oscar for Best Animated Feature to Shrek? Awards aren’t everything — not to mention they’re political and subjective — but the loss still feels like a sore spot in Pixar’s history. Unlike the movie that took the crown that year, Monsters Inc. holds up as something like an even more intimate Toy Story. It’s in part a platonic love story between an odd couple of monsters, the one-eyed Mike Wazowski and furry blue Sulley. Throw in a human toddler nicknamed Boo, who ends up in the guys’ care after getting lost in the monster world, and things get a bit more special.

Boo, Mike, and Sulley’s makeshift family is where Monsters Inc. wrings out its most emotional moments, even if it may be easy to cynically consider her a human plot device meant to inspire coos from viewers and create drama between her two fumbling monster dads. But Monsters Inc. is charming, funny, and often moving nonetheless.

In contrast to the more meme-friendly Shrek, Monsters Inc. doesn’t have an extensive internet legacy. And maybe that has clouded some folks’ memory of its quality — there’s nothing like Shrek’s “All Star” sequence. (A high-energy musical number from Billy Crystal’s Mike comes really close, though.) But there’s a reason Pixar revisited the film with a (much less engrossing) prequel: Mike and Sulley are as classic a pair of best friends as Buzz Lightyear and Woody. It just may be harder to remember it because there’s no goofy alt-rock song attached. —AF

13. Incredibles 2 (2018)

It took 14 years for director Brad Bird to return to the world of 2004’s The Incredibles (one of Pixar’s finest films), and in that time, the world had gone absolutely gaga for superheroes. So this sequel engages with questions of what we’re looking for from superhero storytelling and from our current superhero boom.

But it’s also interested in a whole host of other questions, like what it means to be exceptional and how to balance the needs of the self against the needs of the community. That it wraps all this up in a zippy plot filled with brilliant action sequences and is centered on Holly Hunter’s Helen Parr (a.k.a. Elastigirl) gives the movie plenty of visual and storytelling verve. It’s messier than the first film, and at times, it’s hard to parse exactly what its villain’s motivations are. But that pales in comparison to all the stuff that works, because it works so, so well. —EV

12. Toy Story 4 (2019)

If Toy Story 4 is the end of the Toy Story franchise, it will be a satisfying one. While its predecessors are more ensemble-focused, this movie is really about Woody, the pull-string cowboy, as he comes to terms with his own obsolescence. Bonnie, who inherits Woody at the end of Toy Story 3, doesn’t love him as much as his original owner, Andy — leaving Woody to look for meaning in a life that doesn’t match up with the way he’s always believed it was supposed to go. Woven into the plot are vulnerable moments about how we deal with love, our feelings, and relationships that fall off with age.

Toy Story 4’s message to viewers is that we don’t have to stop loving someone just because they’re not in our lives anymore. And even if those relationships end, it doesn’t make them any less special or powerful. While one could argue these themes were already explored in the second and third Toy Story movies, Toy Story 4 still stands out with its rich storytelling and focused story. —AAS

11. Inside Out (2015)

When it was released in 2015, on the heels of a rough patch for Pixar (from when 2011’s Cars 2 became the only Pixar movie with a rotten score on Rotten Tomatoes to when The Good Dinosaur had to abandon a late 2014 release date due to production problems), Inside Out felt like the studio finally righting its way. Its depiction of the emotions guiding the inner life of a girl on the cusp of adolescence was clever and visually innovative, while its cast (including Amy Poehler, Mindy Kaling, and Bill Hader) was perfectly chosen.

The movie’s superb storytelling introduces incredibly complex ideas — like the notion that two emotions can combine into some third emotion, more complicated than either of them alone — in ways that make instant sense to the audience without tons of exposition. And the message that sometimes feeling darker emotions like sadness and anger is necessary is a meaningful one. Inside Out has its problems (particularly its perhaps too simplistic view of the divide between men and women), but on the whole, it’s a sneakily devastating good time. —EV

10. Toy Story 3 (2010)

Toy Story 3 is a heartbreaker. It’s the perfect culmination of a story that, when it came out in 2010, had been 15 years in the making. Andy, the kid who owned the franchise’s familiar ensemble of toys, grew up and out of his once-beloved playthings. As viewers, maybe his choice to ditch his toys as he preps for college feels unfair, even cruel. We love Woody and Buzz, after all — doesn’t Andy remember that he once did, too?

Of course he does. But as he enters a new phase of life to be filled with new people, new memories, new loves, his toys must accommodate him. And they have to come to terms with their own growth too; as new residents of Sunnyside Daycare, they’re about to meet new kids and learn to love them, as scary as that can seem.

As a viewer around Andy’s age when Toy Story 3 came out, I found the film beautiful, if very difficult to watch. Yes, it’s beautiful and emotional at any age (there’s a scene toward the end with an incinerator that should be used as a sociopathy test, because if you don’t cry, there’s an issue). But watching it as I sat on the cusp of college myself, I found it to be the most affecting, realistic portrait of the transition to adulthood I’d ever seen in animation. This was the dramatic, necessary conclusion that Pixar had been building toward since the first Toy Story. All apologies to Toy Story 4, but Toy Story 3 will always feel like the series’ true finale. —AF

9. Coco (2017)

Coco doesn’t get enough credit for being one of the most beautiful films of Pixar’s entire run — if not the past 25 years overall. That first glimpse of the soaring, stupendous, and sweetly spooky Land of the Dead is breathtaking. But a failure to fully recognize Coco’s beauty could be blamed on how wonderfully Coco tells a story about how crucial our families are to who we become.

Miguel, the movie’s plucky protagonist, travels to the underworld to find out about himself and his family’s history, but ends up finally understanding his grandmother and, for the first time, truly discovers who she is. Through the journey, he realizes that love is the only way for him, and for those who have died, to forever remain in the world of the living — at least in spirit. In Coco’s world, and in ours too, love, life, and survival are one and the same. —AAS

8. Toy Story 2 (1999)

Toy Story 2’s magic lies in its ability to add world-shattering wrinkles into the fabric of everything we thought we knew about Toy Story. In this installment, Woody’s going through an existential crisis, as he has to choose between leaving Andy to “live” (a loose interpretation of the word) in a Japanese museum forever or staying with Andy, despite Woody’s fears that Andy will outgrow him. The narrative twists and trapdoors in making Woody more cognizant of his own existence, and his wants and desires, are equal parts stress-inducing and thought-provoking for those of us who have grown attached to the pull-string cowboy. The creativity, adventure, and emotional depth in Toy Story 2 make it, in the eyes of some viewers, the best Toy Story of all time. [Ed. note: Our collective ranking suggests otherwise, but it’s all subjective, right?] —AAS

7. Up (2009)

One of my favorite things about Up is the delighted conversation my friends had upon its release about Kevin the Bird. Granted, there are lots of reasons to love Up: It’s masterful at wrangling its openly bittersweet emotions, particularly showcased in Pixar’s best and most memorable opening montage. It’s dotted with faint touches of magical realism that befit its South American locale, and many of them are warmhearted surprises: Balloon-ship houses! Dogs that can tell you they love you! “Squirrel!”

But none of them top my excited group of friends explaining to me, a clueless white person, how funny it is that Russell, the eager boy scout who accompanies grieving widower Carl on his mission to the Venezuelan tepuis, names the exotic bird they find “Kevin.” Russell is a tiny Asian kid, they explained, and Asian guys named Kevin are a whole Thing. To me, Kevin was just a bird named Kevin; to them, it was an entire sly cultural in-joke.

Look, Up is only the second animated film ever nominated for a Best Picture Oscar, deservedly, and it’s my favorite Pixar film because of its warmth, its humor, and its painful truths about grieving and letting go. But it’s also full of small coded details like “Kevin,” and they remind me that it might be even more special for eager Asian kids like Russell than it is for me. I love Up all the more for that. —AR

6. Ratatouille (2007)

Ratatouille is best remembered for its triumphant finale, which serves as a thesis on the nature of criticism — one that almost feels like director Brad Bird is speaking to film critics directly through the intimidating food writer Anton Ego. But Bird isn’t thumbing his nose at critics or their work. Instead, his film’s message is that love for art of all forms is what inspires all critics, professional or otherwise; that’s what drives us, and that’s what we mustn’t forget.

What makes this remarkably strong takeaway so effective is that Ratatouille works as a great example of why film critics are so drawn to the medium. The movie is a work of art on its own — beautifully animated, with a well-constructed story. And its characters, from the dopey cook Linguini to “little chef” Remy the rat, each tell us something about art itself. Art is an opportunity to share our passion, and it can offer pleasure, no matter the bona fides of its origin.

This resonates even if you aren’t a critic by trade. In all art, we seek entertainment, or joy, or excitement. And Ratatouille offers all of that in spades. The movie benefits from the work of a Pixar crew performing at its height, even if its high-concept, slightly bizarre story — a rat that cooks? It’s weird! — could suggest at first that it may not sing for audiences quite as beautifully as some of Pixar’s other stories. Not the case: As Anton Ego says, “A great artist can come from anywhere.” Ratatouille is a great artist, and great art. —AF

5. Finding Nemo (2003)

Finding Nemo’s greatness can be measured in the sheer number of characters — minor and major — that you think about long after the movie’s over. There’s Nemo, Dory, and Marlin, the core trio, but there’s also Gil, Bruce, and even smaller characters like Peach, the Allison Janney-voiced starfish, and Pearl, the baby octopus who inked herself. Nemo succeeds in not only capturing the natural beauty and wonder of our real-life ocean but also telling a story about parenthood and friendship and, to our own deep sadness, the fragility of life in a way — and through diverse, myriad characters — that we don’t usually think about. —AAS

4. Soul (2020)

It feels terrifying, even a little gutsy, to say that a movie arriving this many years into Pixar’s oeuvre might top some of the studio’s classics. But I think Soul’s position is merited, for a few reasons.

It’s a story about a jazz musician and souls in search of a “spark,” and it may be the most philosophically complex of the studio’s work. Director Pete Docter (who also made Inside Out) and co-director Kemp Powers tackle a traditional theme in family-friendly animated movies — finding your unique purpose in life — and turn it on its head, subtly challenging our culture’s focus on “doing what you love” as your occupation. Instead, they think with more complexity about the many things that make us human, and they do it with humor, grace, and subtlety that feels uncommon in animated storytelling, even from Pixar.

They also do it with incredible visual imagination. Segments of Soul bend visual conventions that we are used to seeing from Pixar, evoking other dimensions and planes of being with different sorts of art. And even when the characters are just moseying along the streets of New York, the landscape is rendered in such detail and with such attention to texture that the specificity feels almost startling. The biggest joy of animation is that you can do things with it that you can’t do with live-action, and Pixar pulls out all the stops in crafting Soul’s world. —AW

3. Toy Story (1995)

Rare is it that a film studio gets its first-ever feature just right. But Pixar came out of the gate as a unique breed: a studio that dared to release a full-length animated movie created entirely with computer-generated graphics. In 1995, that was unheard of; traditional animation was still dominant. Despite having little competition on that front, Pixar wowed audiences not just on the basis of Toy Story’s impressive novelty but also through the film’s sheer wit, storytelling, and maturity. Its introduction of Woody and Buzz Lightyear, opposites who very much repel each other until they naturally attract, contends with love, friendship, and the meaning of life in funny and thoughtful ways.

While Pixar’s work has become more technically advanced in the past two decades, I’m still so drawn to how the original Toy Story feels lived-in and expansive, like every nook and cranny of Andy’s room could be worth exploring. As a kid, I found that world to be, well, a world: somewhere I felt safe and comfortable and excited to see more of. That’s something I continue to look for in movies, particularly animated ones; while Pixar continues to craft living, breathing universes for its stories, Toy Story’s remains the one I feel as though I know best.

It helps that Toy Story is the longest-running franchise in Pixar’s oeuvre, just slightly edging out Cars. What makes Toy Story so essential where Cars feels exhausting, though, is the toys. Watching Buzz and Woody’s friendship grow is an emotional experience; the 90-minute journey they take to accepting one another remains powerful. Above all, their relationship is why the toys’ (and Pixar’s) inaugural outing remains as funny, dazzling, and satisfying today as it was in 1995. “You’ve Got a Friend in Me,” indeed. —AF

2. The Incredibles (2004)

Brad Bird is the closest thing Pixar has to an auteur filmmaker, who makes movies with a strong, personal vision that keep returning to the same ideas over and over. And his first movie for Pixar, The Incredibles, showed off his talent for large-scale action sequences balanced against small-scale domestic comedy, in a tale of a family of superheroes living in a world that’s made superpowers illegal after some unfortunate incidents and massive amounts of property damage.

What’s great about Incredibles is how it balances the two sides of its personality, while also allowing for a surprisingly meaty dive into ideas about what it means to be “special” and making room for other people to have their own sense of specialness. The ideas in this film have gotten Bird accused of being a Randian objectivist, but what’s so smart about The Incredibles is how Bird never pins himself too thoroughly to any one point of view. This is a movie that can be read on many different levels, from a simple family comedy to an action movie imbued with philosophy to a genuine war of political principles that manages to pack in some great sight gags. —EV

1. Wall-E (2008)

All by itself, Wall-E’s sublime, dreamy opening sequence, in which a lonely android compacts trash on a desolate planet while enjoying the strains of Hello, Dolly!, would warrant its place at the top of our list. Like a little mermaid who’s been collecting human gadgets and gizmos for several hundred years, Wall-E has managed to retrieve something like a soul out of all that discarded refuse; like us, he’s entranced by musical theater, baffled by sporks, and full of love. This image of an adorable Curiosity-like rover keeping his spirit alive after centuries of solitude is simultaneously full of heartbreak and hope, and the film rides that delicate balance all the way through its wrenching highs and lows as Wall-E and his fellow android Eve fight to bring humanity home.

Pixar’s finest movie trusts frequently in its purely aesthetic storytelling, keeping viewers absorbed through long, dialogue-less scenes that marry stellar animation, intricate world-building, and superb sound engineering. Its perfectly humanistic androids have deeply human hearts, in contrast to actual humans, who’ve been cruising in space for so long that they’ve fallen into a lethargic simulacrum of real life. Writer Andrew Stanton has constructed one near-perfect story after another for Pixar over the years, but with Wall-E, he gets closer than ever, simply by presenting the dystopian future as a product of everyday environmental mismanagement, corporate greed, and out-of-control consumption and wastefulness, and letting the results largely speak for themselves.

Even as it dives into conversation with Kubrick and Sagan, Atompunk and Heinlein, Wall-E never fully feels retro because it never stops asking painfully contemporary questions. We need its dose of clear-eyed, restorative faith, perhaps even more now than we did a decade ago. —AR

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Editor’s note, May 24, 2021: Since this piece was originally published in April 2020, scientific consensus has shifted. Now some experts say the “lab leak” theory warrants an investigation, along with the natural origin theory, and information in this article may be out of date. For our most up-to-date coverage of the coronavirus pandemic, visit Vox’s coronavirus hub.


One of the great mysteries of the Covid-19 pandemic is how, exactly, the SARS-CoV-2 virus made the leap from wildlife into humans. Scientists who’ve analyzed the virus’s genome believe it came from a bat, likely in China. But Chinese epidemiologists have revealed little about how or where the first patients were infected.

One focus has been a wet market in Wuhan, where live wildlife was sold for food, because 66 percent of the first cluster of 41 cases in December 2019 had exposure to this market. Yet there is also genomic evidence and reports the virus could have been circulating earlier, in November. Which means there are many other possible places it could have jumped from a bat, or an intermediary species, to humans.

Finding the index case, or “patient zero,” for an infectious disease that’s just emerged can take months or years, if the person can even be found at all. So it’s not unusual we still don’t have one, especially for a disease with so much asymptomatic transmission.

Into the vacuum has seeped a potent, speculative, and confusing discussion about the virus’s origin, particularly in the US, where the GOP is intensifying its efforts to blame China for the pandemic.

In March, I offered explanations from virus experts for why they dismiss two of the theories that have surfaced about the coronavirus origin: that Chinese scientists bioengineered it in a lab and/or deployed it as a bioweapon.

In this piece, I’ll address the theory du jour: that a Chinese researcher was infected with the new virus inside a high-containment Wuhan laboratory and accidentally spread it, after which China attempted to cover it up.

This hypothesis has been circulating in US, UK, and Chinese media since February, with fresh reporting and speculation this month in the Daily Mail, Vanity Fair, Fox News, and the Washington Post. A Tuesday op-ed drawing solely from circumstantial evidence by chief “labber” Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) in the Wall Street Journal raised the question anew.

Riding the wave of these reports, President Donald Trump is also now using this potential avenue for blaming China; on April 15, he said his government was looking into whether the virus came from the Wuhan lab. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has also said Beijing “needs to come clean” on what it knows about the virus’s origin.

Trump and the GOP’s motivation to establish new ways to blame China for the pandemic is clear: The president’s response to the pandemic has been abominable, and he faces an election in six months, with more than 22 million people unemployed and an economy heading toward recession. The lab-escape theory joins a variety of arguments he and his supporters are using — including scapegoating the World Health Organization and former President Barack Obama — to divert attention from his failures.

The Wuhan lab may also be the most tantalizing of the diversions, not just for Trump’s supporters but also for some political journalists and China hawks. What if the catastrophe is a result not of nature but of China’s incompetence with handling viruses and habit for suppressing information?

Such a spy-novel-worthy plot may seem plausible for a number of reasons: the Chinese government’s poor record of transparency; the fact that the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a research center with facilities in the same city where the virus first appeared, was studying dangerous pathogens, including bat coronaviruses; and US officials’ concerns about the lab’s safety standards in 2018, per the Washington Post.

Yet five scientists I interviewed, some of whom have worked extensively in China with researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, say the pandemic can’t logically be pinned on an accident at that lab. (Researchers at the institute didn’t respond to my request for comment.)

The scientists I did speak to all acknowledge it’s not possible to definitively rule out the lab-escape theory. “The trouble with hypotheses is that they are not disprovable. You cannot prove a negative,” said Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance and a disease ecologist who has studied emerging infectious diseases with colleagues in China. Yet he also sees the lab-escape theory as “ironic and preposterous.”

The scientists I spoke to also noted that all countries with high-level containment facilities, including China and the US, must be vigilant to prevent accidental leaks of dangerous diseases from labs. “I think we all are concerned about the increasing presence of high-consequence pathogens in laboratories and the issue of inadequate biosecurity,” said Dennis Carroll, the former director of USAID’s emerging threats division who helped design Predict, a surveillance program for dangerous animal viruses that the Trump administration chose to shut down in October. “We’ve seen examples of inadvertent release in the past and I’m sure we will see it in the future. So it’s a very major concern that we need to pay attention to.”

But scientists told me that based on what they know about the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the likelihood of a natural spillover event, they didn’t see lab escape as probable. And one expert added that it could be dangerous to get too preoccupied with this theory when the threat of another disease with pandemic potential from wildlife is so high.

Since politics will continue to propel this theory into the public sphere, let’s walk through six reasons a lab leak is unlikely.

1) The probability of the virus jumping from animals to humans outside the lab is much higher than the virus infecting humans inside the lab

Daszak is a scientist who has spent the past 15 years collaborating with scientists in China and other emerging disease hot spots around the world to find out where dangerous viruses lurking in wildlife — like the first SARS virus, MERS, and Ebola — are, how they get into people, and how to stop people from spreading them and spiraling into pandemics.

He says he’s confident SARS-CoV-2, the new coronavirus, originated in bats and jumped into people somewhere, likely in China, because he and his colleagues have established that viruses like it are out there and there are so many opportunities for this to happen.

“If you do the math on this, it’s very straightforward. … We have hundreds of millions of bats in Southeast Asia and about 10 percent of bats in some colonies have viruses at any one time. So that’s hundreds of thousands of bats every night with viruses,” Daszak says. “We also find tens of thousands of people in the wildlife trade, hunting and killing wildlife in China and Southeast Asia, and millions of people living in rural populations in Southeast Asia near bat caves.”

Next, he says, consider the data he’s collected on people near bat caves getting exposed to viruses: “We went out and surveyed a population in Yunnan, China — we’d been to bat caves and found viruses that we thought could be high risk. So we sample people nearby, and 3 percent had antibodies to those viruses,” he says. “So between the last two and three years, those people were exposed to bat coronaviruses. If you extrapolate that population across the whole of Southeast Asia, it’s 1 million to 7 million people a year getting infected by bat viruses.”

Compare that, he says, to what we know about the labs: “If you look at the labs in Southeast Asia that have any coronaviruses in culture, there are probably two or three and they’re in high security. The Wuhan Institute of Virology does have a small number of bat coronaviruses in culture. But they’re not [the new coronavirus], SARS-CoV-2. There are probably half a dozen people that do work in those labs. So let’s compare 1 million to 7 million people a year to half a dozen people; it’s just not logical.”

But he told me he gets why people in the US, who aren’t regularly exposed to bats, have a hard time understanding how great the risk is of humans getting infected with novel coronaviruses circulating in bats.

“I understand — it’s a weird thing. Bats live out there, we don’t see them that often, we don’t realize how common, how abundant, how diverse they are,” he says. “In Southeast Asia, they carry their own viruses, and there’s just this really big interface between bats and people, every night, every day. People live in caves, people shelter from the rain in caves, people hunt bats.”

Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at Columbia University, also sees the lab-leak theory as very unlikely. “This virus came from bats under unknown circumstances,” she told me. “While I cannot rule out the lab-accident theory, there are so many other possibilities for how it could have happened. It could have been someone collecting bat guano for fertilizer, somebody cleaning out a barn, somebody exploring a cave. It could be any situation like that of someone in contact with animals who then spread it to other humans. There are so many other options than a lab leak.”

2) Yes, the Wuhan lab studied bat coronaviruses and SARS-related viruses. But there’s no evidence it discovered or was working on the new virus.

One of the big arguments “labber” theorists make for why we should suspect the Wuhan Institute of Virology of accidentally leaking the virus: Researchers there were already studying bat coronaviruses.

This is true; they published studies on the first SARS coronavirus that infected humans in 2003 and other bat coronaviruses, noting presciently in one paper, “it is highly likely that future SARS- or MERS-like coronavirus outbreaks will originate from bats, and there is an increased probability that this will occur in China.”

In 2020, they reported on a virus called RaTG13 that they’d discovered in a cave in Yunnan, China, in 2013. This virus shares 96 percent of its genome with the new coronavirus, which makes it the new virus’s closest known relative.

Some have speculated that perhaps the new coronavirus is derived from RaTG13. Yet virologists say it’s very unlikely: A 4 percent difference in genome is actually huge in evolutionary terms.

“The level of genome sequence divergence between SARS-CoV-2 and RaTG13 is equivalent to an average of 50 years (and at least 20 years) of evolutionary change,” said Edward Holmes, a professor at the University of Sydney who has published six academic papers this year on the genome and origin of SARS-CoV-2, in a statement. “Hence, SARS-CoV-2 was not derived from RaTG13.”

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Another questionable assumption is that the mere existence of a related virus in the lab signals the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 was also there.

Daszak, who collaborates with the Wuhan bat coronavirus researchers and has co-authored papers with them, says this is false. He and the researchers there were indeed looking for viruses related to the first SARS virus, also known as SARS-1, in the hope of finding ones that might be a threat to humans. He confirmed that they had collected samples of bat feces that contained viruses and brought them back to the Wuhan lab.

However, he said, the new coronavirus is only 80 percent similar to SARS-1 — again, a very big difference. “No one [in Wuhan] cultured viruses from those samples that were 20 percent different, i.e., no one had SARS-CoV-2 in culture. All of the hypotheses [of lab release] depend on them having it in culture or bats in a lab. No one’s got bats in a lab, it’s absolutely unnecessary and very difficult to do.” (Cell culture is a way of storing viruses in vitro in a lab so they can be studied over long periods.)

3) Scientists like to gossip about new viruses. There was no chatter before the outbreak about the virus that causes Covid-19.

Carroll, the former director of USAID’s emerging threats division who also spent years working with emerging infectious disease scientists in China, agrees that there’s no evidence the Chinese researchers were working with a novel pathogen. His reasoning? He would have heard about it.

“The reason I’m not putting a lot of weight on [the lab-escape theory] is there was no chatter prior to the emergence of this virus to a discovery that would have ended up bringing the virus into a lab,” he says. “And if nothing else, the scientific community tends to be very gossipy. If there is a novel, potentially dangerous virus which has been identified, circulating in nature, and it’s brought into a laboratory, there is chatter about that. And when you look back retrospectively, there’s no chatter whatsoever about the discovery of a new virus.”

Carroll is confident he would have heard about it because, in his current role as head of the Global Virome Project, he has his ear to the ground and remains active in the community.

When I asked if the Chinese researchers would have kept it secret, he replied, “People will come back and say China is China, they would have suppressed that information. But Chinese scientists, I think, are just as gregarious as everyone else.”

Rasmussen, for her part, also thinks there’s no suggestion of a cover-up. “I haven’t seen evidence of a grand conspiracy to cover up that there was a lab leak of this virus,” she said.

4) The US military chief reviewed the evidence and says “the weight of evidence seems to indicate natural” origin

As the lab-escape theory has gotten more attention in the media, we’ve learned that US military and intelligence officials have also been reviewing the possibility.

On April 14, we got a window into what those ongoing investigations have revealed so far about whether the virus leaked from a lab or jumped to people outside a lab, in nature.

“There’s a lot of rumor and speculation in a wide variety of media, blog sites, etc,” Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley told reporters at the Pentagon. “It should be no surprise to you that we’ve taken a keen interest in that, and we’ve had a lot of intelligence look at that. And I would just say at this point, it’s inconclusive, although the weight of evidence seems to indicate natural [origin]. But we don’t know for certain.”

Brig. Gen. Paul Friedrichs, the Joint Staff surgeon, has also said “there is nothing to” the idea that the virus originated in a laboratory as a bioweapon experiment.

What’s more, as the New York Times reported in its sweeping April 11 review of the administration’s failed coronavirus response, intelligence officials couldn’t find evidence for the lab theory after Matthew Pottinger, the deputy national security adviser who was one of the earliest advocates for Trump to refer to Covid-19 as the “Wuhan virus,” pushed them to look for it:

With his skeptical — some might even say conspiratorial — view of China’s ruling Communist Party, Mr. Pottinger initially suspected that President Xi Jinping’s government was keeping a dark secret: that the virus may have originated in one of the laboratories in Wuhan studying deadly pathogens. In his view, it might have even been a deadly accident unleashed on an unsuspecting Chinese population.

During meetings and telephone calls, Mr. Pottinger asked intelligence agencies — including officers at the C.I.A. working on Asia and on weapons of mass destruction — to search for evidence that might bolster his theory.

They didn’t have any evidence. Intelligence agencies did not detect any alarm inside the Chinese government that analysts presumed would accompany the accidental leak of a deadly virus from a government laboratory.

Newsweek reported April 27 that in March the US Defense Intelligence Agency issued a report that “reveals that U.S. intelligence revised its January assessment in which it ‘judged that the outbreak probably occurred naturally’ to now include the possibility that the new coronavirus emerged ‘accidentally’ due to ‘unsafe laboratory practices’ in the central Chinese city of Wuhan.”

Again, the US government’s investigation into the theory is ongoing, so it’s possible it will turn up new information. But so far, the reports we do have suggest the natural origin is more likely.

5) Wuhan Institute of Virology scientists deny a lab leak

There’s no question the Chinese government and ruling party made grave errors in managing the outbreak from the outset that contributed to its spread around the world. And according to Nature, the government is putting in place new rules in reviewing research on the virus origin.

As Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) put it to my colleague Alex Ward, “We don’t know the true extent of the Chinese government’s complicity in the spread of the virus, and we may never have a full picture due to their obfuscation and control of information. We do know that they lied to their own people and the world about the details and spread of the virus, and today we face a pandemic that has left no country untouched.”

And China should, as the Washington Post’s David Ignatius pointed out on April 23, “promptly begin a serious, credible investigation into how the Covid-19 pandemic began.”

But the scientists I interviewed say that we still shouldn’t immediately conflate the work of the highly regarded Chinese scientists who work at the lab with the transgressions of their government.

We also have the word of one of the top virologists at the Wuhan lab, documented in news articles, that she too wondered if the virus could have originated in her lab and then took steps to verify it didn’t match any of the viruses they had in culture.

In this excellent article by Jane Qiu in Scientific American, we learned that the team at the Wuhan lab led by Shi Zhengli, known as China’s “bat woman” for her 16 years of work collecting samples of bat viruses in caves, sequenced the genome of the new virus in early January and published it on January 23:

Shi instructed her team to repeat the tests and, at the same time, sent the samples to another laboratory to sequence the full viral genomes. Meanwhile she frantically went through her own laboratory’s records from the past few years to check for any mishandling of experimental materials, especially during disposal. Shi breathed a sigh of relief when the results came back: none of the sequences matched those of the viruses her team had sampled from bat caves. “That really took a load off my mind,” she says. “I had not slept a wink for days.”

Yuan Zhiming, vice director of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, also recently spoke up on Chinese state broadcaster CGTN. “As people who carry out viral study, we clearly know what kind of research is going on in the institute and how the institute manages viruses and samples. As we said early on, there is no way this virus came from us,” he said, according to NBC News.

I asked Jim LeDuc, head of the Galveston National Laboratory, a level-4 biosafety lab in Texas, for his thoughts on Yuan’s statement. “I like to think that we can take Zhiming Yuan at his word, but he works in a very different culture with pressures we may not fully appreciate,” he said. In other words, we don’t know what kind of pressures he might be under from his government to make such a statement.

LeDuc says the hypothesis that the animal market played a role in the virus jumping to humans also remains strong. “The linkage back to the market is pretty realistic, and consistent with what we saw with SARS,” said LeDuc. “It’s a perfectly plausible and logical explanation: The virus exists in nature and, jumping hosts, finds that it likes humans just fine, thank you.“

6) State Department officials worried about safety issues at the Wuhan lab in 2018. This is concerning but doesn’t prove its scientists were incompetent.

In an April 14 piece, Josh Rogin, a global opinions columnist for the Washington Post, reported that in January 2018, the US Embassy in Beijing dispatched science diplomats to the Wuhan Institute of Virology who later sent back cables that warned of “safety and management weaknesses at the WIV lab and proposed more attention and help.”

Rogin went on to cite an anonymous senior administration official’s belief that “the cables provide one more piece of evidence to support the possibility that the pandemic is the result of a lab accident in Wuhan.”

The article sparked a rich discussion on Twitter, with Rasmussen of Columbia pointing out, “The bottom line is that those vague diplomatic cables do not provide any specific information suggesting that #SARSCoV2 emerged from incompetence or poor biosafety protocols or anything else.”

In a follow-up conversation with me, she reiterated: “This line that they’re incompetent, it doesn’t hold water with me.”

Other scientists who have worked with the Wuhan Institute of Virology have spoken up about its standards and practices in the face of the theory it leaked the virus.

“I have worked in this exact laboratory at various times for the past 2 years,” wrote Danielle Anderson, scientific director of the Duke-NUS Medical School ABSL3 Laboratory, in a March 2 post on Health Feedback, a site where scientists review the veracity of news reports. “I can personally attest to the strict control and containment measures implemented while working there. The staff at WIV are incredibly competent, hardworking, and are excellent scientists with superb track records.”

Gerald Keusch, a professor of medicine and international health and associate director of Boston University’s National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories, also doubts the lab would have been prone to accidents.

“The Wuhan lab is (as far as I know because I have never visited) state of the art in terms of safety and security systems and protocols, and because [the Galveston National Laboratory in the US] helped to train many of them and has collaborations I would bet they are highly professional, which makes the likelihood of an accident remote,” he said. “Is it possible? Yes. Is it likely? In my opinion, no.”

We may never find out exactly when this virus made the leap into humans. But focusing too much on the lab-leak theory could ultimately be dangerous.

Since there’s no robust evidence in support of the lab-leak theory, Daszak says he’s worried that it could become a conspiratorial distraction with serious consequences.

“There is a group of people who do not want to believe that this is a natural, unfortunate incident,” he said. “And the real bad part of that is that if we don’t believe that we won’t try and stop other viruses in wildlife. Instead, we will focus on labs and close them down when they’re the ones trying to develop vaccines to cure us right now. I mean, how ironic could we go?”

Carroll says the lab-leak theory, even if there isn’t evidence to support it, is a healthy reminder that lab accidents can happen and that biosecurity needs attention in country studying dangerous pathogens. But he’s also much more concerned with preventing the next pandemic.

Pandemics, says Carroll, do not have to happen. “They are a consequence of the way we live. You can pick [viruses] up earlier if you’re really including in your surveillance those places where animals and people are having high-risk interaction, those hot spots.”

If you have that surveillance, “you would never get a virus sweeping out of hand. You would never get a repeat of an uncontrolled, unrecognized event.”

Which means it’s time for the whole world to invest in studying the viruses in the bat caves and beyond, and building up the systems to stop them from spreading in humans, so this doesn’t happen again. Because otherwise, it will.