Ian O’Riordan: Mark Carroll a rightful member of distance running’s hall of fame

Prior to most people in this country even conceiving of Black Friday there was a notable date in some Irish running minds which traditionally happened the Monday before. An event running every November since 1938, except for 1943 and 2020, when more worldly matters intervened.

This being the Monday before Thanksgiving in the United States, their national holiday always celebrated on the fourth Thursday in November, after which comes Black Friday, a made-up tradition where the shops reopen promising unbeatable prices for the start of the Christmas season. God knows how that ever caught on over here.

Anyway, this Monday marked the climax of the college cross-country season in the United States, the NCAA Championships the focus for many young Irish scholarship runners over the years, all chasing the footsteps of Ronnie Delany.

In recent years the event moved to this Saturday, for practical purposes, the 85th edition set for Charlottesville, Virginia and featuring 62 of the best Division One colleges in the United States, men and women, qualifying 255 runners in each race, 510 runners in all.

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No matter what you believe, the hardest races to win aren’t always at the Olympics. And the NCAA Championships is unquestionably the hardest cross-country race to win in the United States. Despite the long Irish tradition of involvement, precious few have made the podium. Limerick’s Neil Cusack was our first winner in 1972, running for East Tennessee, taking the title won the previous year by American Steve Prefontaine.

This is the same race even John Treacy couldn’t win, finishing second in 1977 to Kenya’s Henry Rono at the Hangman Valley Golf Course in Spokane, Washington, just a few months before Treacy won the World Cross-Country in Glasgow. There has only been one other Irish-born winner of the men’s race since, Keith Kelly triumphing for Providence College in 2000. Sonia O’Sullivan is still the only Irish woman to win with her back-to-back titles for Villanova in 1990-91.

My experience of running there came a year after, on that November Monday in 1992, on a pure cross-country course in Bloomington, Indiana. Rarely has the Irish presence run so deep: Conor Holt of Oklahoma in seventh, Eddie O’Carroll of Western Kentucky ninth, Frank Hanley up there too in 13th, Niall Bruton, also from Arkansas, 25th, around a dozen more of us somewhere further back.

Best of us all that Monday was Mark Carroll, finishing third behind Indiana’s finest, Bob Kennedy, later the first non-African to run the 5,000 metres in under 13 minutes.

Carroll’s run for Providence was brilliant on several fronts. Still only a 20-year-old sophomore, cross-country wasn’t even his strength. He was already better known for his stylishly smooth stride on the track, and running somewhere far behind him that day gave me a sense of how good he could be.

Carroll made the podium again in 1995, this time finishing second to Zambian-born Godfrey Siamusiye, those being his only two NCAA cross-country appearances, injury denying him the rest.

After that he focused on the track and then the road, producing arguably the greatest range of performances by any Irish distance runner, with a natural exception for O’Sullivan.

Getting to witness many more of those performances, Carroll came to mind this week in advance of his induction into the Athletics Ireland Hall of Fame on Wednesday, as part at their annual awards. I’d place a legend beside that.

Carroll may not have all the fame or indeed medal count to rival the likes O’Sullivan, or indeed others. But if you consider again his range; from 3:34:91 for 1,500m, 3:50:62 for the mile, 7:30:36 for 3,000m, 13:03:93 for 5,000m, 27:47:82 for 10,000m, and 2:10:54 for the marathon – all run long before the dawn of super spikes or shoes.

His 7:30:36 for 3,000m, run in Monaco in 1999, ranks as one of the very best in the Irish record books, and after witnessing his 2:10:54 for the marathon, when he finished sixth in New York in 2002, there’s no doubt he was a runner for all seasons too.

What also set Carroll apart was his attitude, part of which came from growing up in Cork city’s northside neighbourhood of Knocknaheeney, built around social housing in the 1970s. It wasn’t an area of huge discrimination, and yet for Carroll it instilled this sense he wasn’t better than everybody else, but he’d show them he could be just as good.

It was an attitude carefully nurtured by Brother John Dooley, his first mentor at North Monastery secondary school. The same age and cut from the same cloth as Roy Keane, Carroll also shared that same physical commitment and mental resilience.

Carroll did win medals along the way, beginning with bronze in the European Under-20 5,000m in 1991, NCAA indoor gold over 5,000m, and bronze again in the senior European Championships in 1998, that performance naturally outshone by O’Sullivan’s 5,000m-10,000m double.

He also added his name to the Irish winners of the famed Wanamaker Mile, in 2000, before producing another masterpiece 3,000m at the European Indoor Championships in Ghent a few weeks later. Moroccan-born Belgian Mohammed Mourhit was house favourite to win, before Carroll blasted past him and everyone else on the last lap, winning in 7:49:24.

After qualifying for but missing the 1996 Olympics with injury, Carroll went to Sydney 2000 with high hopes, only to miss progressing by one place, his heat won by Ali Saidi-Sief from Algeria. At the 2001 World Championships in Edmonton, Carroll was again denied a final place by Saidi-Sief, before the Algerian was busted for EPO.

In the official results, Carroll is now listed as “rightful finalist”, and given his career ran parallel to the known rampant use of EPO in distance running (same as in cycling), it’s impossible not to wonder what else might rightfully be his. Carroll never ran from that question either, telling me a few times he might have a better chance “if some of them weren’t doing what they’re doing . . .”

Given his depth of experience it was no surprise he went into coaching, first at Auburn and then Drake University, before moving to the Boston Athletic Association in 2019, where he is now head of their high performance unit.

Several years back, sharing a beer with Carroll at the Ri Ra Irish bar in Providence, he told me he’d no regrets about his running career, and nor indeed should he. In all my years of witnessing some of the world’s best distance runners, Carroll was every bit as good.