Berlin tales tell the difference between targeting and winning championship medals

It was the morning after some of us spent the night before in a garden bar along the Spree River on the side of old East Berlin, where a young woman frequently emerged from behind the counter to offer us free shots of Jagermeister served in small test tubes she carried in a sort of holster around her waist. How could I not remember.

Or forget waking up that morning to discover two missed calls from my dad and then a text message saying he was already down at the Brandenburg Gate for the start of the women’s 20km race walk and telling me to hurry on. The sun was beaming in the side of the half-open hotel window and it was too hot to sleep anyway.

It was a short, straight stroll from Alexanderplatz down some of the actual 2km race circuit by the Unter den Linden, the old boulevard of linden trees which formerly led directly to the city palace of the Prussian monarchs. About halfway down, already half-parched, I stopped for a breather at one of the many Berliner Pilsner stalls.

“Very hot,” agreed the attendant, prompting me to wonder how on earth Olive Loughnane was going to survive 20km of race walking in conditions such as this.

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This, if not obvious, being the 2009 World Athletics Championships, 13 years ago already and still fresh in mind and spirit.

It had only been 20 years since gangs of young Germans swarmed over the Berlin Wall, waving fistfuls of money and yelling Deutschland über alles, and the revolutionary vibe and a strong whiff of history was still in the air.

After covering these quarters already for six World Championships in succession (Seville ‘99, Edmonton ‘01, Paris ‘03, Helsinki ‘05, Osaka ‘07) and only witnessing a single Irish podium performance – Gillian O’Sullivan’s silver in the 20km walk in Paris – medal expectations were not high, if they existedat all. Only once down at the Brandenburg Gate there was my dad and Brendan Mooney telling me Loughnane was definitely going to win one, Cliona Foley nodding in approval.

They knew what they were talking about – Brendan Moran and Morgan Treacy already in position to capture the moment in pictures too. Loughnane had finished seventh in the Beijing Olympics the year before, and by halfway here – in the now 30 degrees – was in a medal position, broken at the front only by Russia’s defending champion Olga Kaniskina, who the cats on the street of Berlin already knew was probably doping. Which she was.

In the original end Loughnane won silver, 12 seconds ahead of China’s Hong Liu, an astonishing display of athletic courage and determination.

The then 33-year-old mother of one from Loughrea had written her own little piece of history, Ireland’s only fifth medal won at these championships since Eamonn Coghlan first struck gold in Helsinki in 1983. Better still Loughnane was duly promoted to gold when in 2015 Kaniskina was eventually done for a series of doping offences.

What ultimately took Loughnane into that medal-winning position at halfway, and kept her there until the finish, was the knowledge she had finally mastered the event after 10 years of trying, that she wasn’t just targeting a medal but intent on winning one.

Largely self-coached, the key component of her high-performance plan was that she planned most of it herself.

It was still only day two of nine, helping to set the mood for some though not all the Irish performances which followed a few stops down the line inside Berlin’s Olympiastadion, where if the ghost of Adolf Hitler and 1936 doesn’t get you first then the ghost of Jesse Owens soon will.

It remains a daunting arena, and on the Wednesday, Derval O’Rourke produced a brilliant 100m hurdles, finishing fourth, out of lane one, improving her national record from 12.72 to 12.67, the fastest European all year, within half a foot of the bronze medal.

Having already become the first Irish woman to medal in a major sprint event at the 2006 European Championships in Gothenburg, O’Rourke would win a second European silver medal a year later, denied by another serial doper Nevin Yanit from Turkey.

O’Rourke’s medals were likewise always won on her own terms, not someone else’s target, and before the week was out David Gillick also came close to winning another, running 44.88 to make the final of the 400m, before finishing sixth – the winner there, LaShawn Merritt from the US, also banned the following year for a doping offence.

Others perhaps fell short of their own targets, Paul Hession just two places short of sharing a line with Usain Bolt in the 200m final, Rob Heffernan promising to come back stronger after finishing 14th in the 20km walk – which he did, winning European bronze in 2010, Olympic 50km bronze in 2012, then gold in the World Championship 50km walk in 2013. Nine years on that remains the last Irish medal won on the senior global championship stage.

Berlin, though, remains arguably Ireland’s best World Championships, at arguably the best edition, aside from Sonia O’Sullivan being denied double-gold by the doped-up Chinese in Stuttgart in 1993. It’s impossible to think back to that blue track without recalling the two world records Bolt ran there, his 9.58 for 100m and 19.19 for 200m still intact, or Kenenisa Bekele’s 5,000m-10,000m double, before his slow then sudden decline.

Nine years later, at the 2018 European Championships also staged in Berlin, Thomas Barr won bronze in the 400m hurdles, the first Irishman to medal in a sprint event at these championships after 84 years of trying. Medals like these do not come around often.

Now 13 years after Berlin, ahead of 2022 World Championships underway in Eugene, Oregon, Athletics Ireland declared their target of winning one medal as part of their high-performance plan 2022-2024.

They’re also targeting one medal at next month’s European Championships in Munich, another one at next year’s World Championships in Budapest, plus one at the 2024 Olympics in Paris.

The plan states “these performance goals are our opportunities for medals based on objective data from recent and historical championship performances”, another of the headline objectives to increase the number of medals won at targeted championships by a further 20 per cent.

There is a subtle difference between ambitious and realistic targets, and anything can happen in events like the 4x400m mixed relay, still coming a year after Athletics Ireland fell short of their own targets at the Tokyo Olympics, it is hard to tell when these medals might be suddenly won.