THE new president of the Olympic Council of Ireland has apologised unreservedly to the families of athletes left scrambling for tickets during the scandal at last summer’s Games.

Desperate relatives of some of our Olympic heroes were forced to go abroad in their hunt for passes to Rio 2016 after finding it impossible to do so through Ireland’s official seller, PRO10.

2 New OCI boss Sarah Keane

Speaking to the Irish Sun, new OCI president Sarah Keane said what happened last year was “unacceptable”.

She said: “Look, I apologise to the families. I apologise to the athletes who had that stress on them.

“I think sometimes we underestimate our athletes. These are people who are very good at what they do and know how to focus, but we should be trying to eliminate stresses not add to them coming up to big events and I think this was a stress for people.

“I didn’t realise that it was the stress for people in Rio that we all found out it was.

“I knew about swimming that there were some issues. They were contacting our performance team and we did source some tickets ourselves not through PRO10.

“We didn’t have any sense of the fact that this was happening on a wider scale because swimming is one of the most popular sports at the Games, so it’s not unusual for there to be challenges around ­tickets.

“To be fair, what happened was different and was unusual and we just can’t be in that situation again for anybody.

“The families are part of the journey for the athletes and they’re very committed.

“They are the ones that get the child involved in the first place and put money into it.

2 Former OCI boss Pat Hickey

“As an organisation we do what we can, but when the athletes fall it’s their families that are picking them up first and we try to support that and they want to be there to see them at the Games.

“What happened isn’t acceptable.”

The former Swim Ireland head honcho this month replaced controversial OCI veteran leader Pat Hickey in an election result that many have heralded as the ending of the old guard and the dawning of a new age for the organisation.

During the Games, Hickey was arrested in his hotel room and was forced to remain in Brazil for five months over a ticket touting controversy.

The 71-year-old, who had his passport seized, has been accused of ticket touting and illicit marketing, which he denies, and was granted permission to return to Ireland on medical grounds late last year.

Keane, 43, says she has not met with the Dubliner since she took the reins but plans to discuss everything with him in the next few weeks.

She said: “I haven’t met Pat yet but I’ll be contacting him in the next few weeks and then we’ll see how it goes.

“I’d like to sit down with him and one or two other members of the board and have a discussion and see how he’s doing and see how his family is doing but also try and understand how he views going forward.

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“He’s the outgoing president of the Olympic Council and I do believe he has done good things for Irish Olympic sport.”

Hickey was president of the OCI for almost three decades and but this is not something Sarah wants to emulate as she intends to spearhead a move to enforce term limits of four years to the council.

She told the Irish Sun: “We will put term limits down. I believe everybody on the board is in favour of term limits.

“The recommendations of Deloitte are eight to 12 years. My belief is that it’s good to bring new blood and new energy into these things, and if you can stagger it with a certain amount of people staying and a certain amount of people going every time that’s the way that works best.

“I advocate strongly for term limits because it is very hard for new people to put themselves forward if the old person is still sitting in the seat. The terms would be four years and you would have to be elected each four years.”

The new OCI boss told how transparency will be the name of the game for the new board, which will be radically changing our Olympic Council over the coming years.

She said: “We’re still in the ­middle of matters that are ­unresolved, which are clearly in the public interest, and we have to work our way through that, and that is challenging.

Part of that, then, is the rebuilding of trust around that and our credibility as an organisation.

“How we steer our way through, that is one of the ­biggest things facing this organisation.”

Mother-of-three Keane has asked the public to give the new ­Olympic board a chance to sort out the issues facing the council and enact change.

She said: “Please give us a little bit of time and a little bit of patience to try to make some of the changes that we’ve said we’re going to try and do because it is going to take time.

“Change doesn’t come necessarily easily and it doesn’t come quickly. There are certain things we are going to put in place from the start and we are very committed.

“We will stand over what we do or don’t do.

“This week I’ve been doing a fair bit of talking in the media and whatever but we now need to go away and get into the trenches and do the work.”