Ian O'Riordanon why failing to properly prepare, in terms of facilities, is only preparing for failure

WHEN AN athlete steps on to the track at the Olympics it's not simply show time. It's something they've worked towards for years; it's life-defining as, with the whole world watching, their Neil Armstrong moment arrives. Yesterday, David Gillick didn't even step out of the spaceship.

One small step back for Gillick.

One giant leap backward for Irish athletics.

That's the danger of coming to the Olympics with any sort of expectations. If you fail to reach them, and those around you have failed as well, you better be ready to take the rap.

"This is the Olympics," said Gillick. "Every race is tough, but I had aspirations of making the final, and now, my Olympics are over. That's another four years. But I'm not going to make excuses. That's not me. I'm shell-shocked. Gutted. I'll hold my hands up and say I ran crap. And I'm out."

So who is to blame? Should he have been sent up there in the first place? Was he properly prepared? What is Athletics Ireland playing at? Who really cares, because he's going to take the rap anyway, and has at least four years to realise that.

When things go wrong at the Olympics, there is nowhere to hide. You can't blame your team-mates and the manager won't get the sack. You can say you felt tired or your knee hurt and that will sound like an excuse. You can hold your hands up and say you ran crap.

Or else you could have stayed at home, and joined the chorus of disapproval watching the Olympics through their TV guide. There are multiple facets to Olympic participation, but the one that matters is on the small screen.

So all our athletes are crap. We deserve better than this. This is taxpayers' money. We want to see finalists or personal bests and maybe even some medals.

And of course we do. There comes a time when an athlete's failure deserves some hard questioning, and Gillick's failure was certainly one of those times.

Is he training hard enough? Has he bulked up too much? Has he fallen into the comfort zone? Has he got too high an opinion of himself? Gillick didn't even step out of the spaceship yesterday and that demands some answers.

It doesn't matter that he's won two European Indoor titles for Ireland. That he left his family and friends to base himself at Loughborough University in England, because the facilities and coaching simply aren't available in Ireland. That he's put four years work into getting it right at the Olympics, only to see it go inexplicably wrong.

That demands some answers.

And what about Derval O'Rourke? She was miles off her personal best - which is actually a bit of a cheap argument, because less than 10 per cent of athletes run personal bests at the Olympics. The bottom line is she looked a shadow of the athlete that won World Indoor gold and European outdoor silver, and that demands some answers.

And where have all our distance runners gone? Róisín McGettigan made the final of the steeplechase and bombed. Why aren't more athletes coming through the US scholarship system anymore, like Delany, Murphy, Coghlan, Treacy, O'Sullivan, O'Mara, Sonia, etc?

We've pretty much agreed by now that Alistair Cragg is a loser, but then he's not really one of ours anyway, and Pauline Curley was practically an embarrassment in the women's marathon - even if she epitomised the last remnants of the Olympic spirit.

Who wants to see a 39-year-old amateur finishing the marathon when we have Michael Phelps chasing eight gold medals in the Water Cube, all carefully orchestrated for NBC and their 2,000 broadcasters in Beijing (only one of whom, by the way, is staying on for the Paralympics)?

But that's drifting off the point. There are real and difficult questions facing Irish athletics and it can't go on like this. Like where is the proper indoor track Ireland has been crying out for since around 1980? Where are the proper coaches - the hard, demanding coaches - like every serious athletics nation has? What is the point of giving athletes any more grant money when they're clearly wasting every penny of it?

Radical change will require some radical action, and there are several model examples. Britain have spread their investment far and wide and are cleaning up in the cycling velodrome and down in Qingdao. Sweden don't fund their athletes but built 23 indoor training tracks and have one of the best teams in Beijing.

They are the long-term solutions. We can blame the athletes for now, or else we should have kept most of them at home to begin with, because as things stand, that's the only alternative.