ATHLETICS:Corkman with great engine and fiery commitment matures into charismatic and hugely respected mentor, writes Ian O'Riordan

THE FIRST and only time I met Roy Keane was in the stadium lift at Croke Park. We were exiting the sixth level after the opening ceremony of the Special Olympics, and because I jumped in at the last second, I ended up staring Keane straight in the face.

Luckily I'd been sipping a glass of red wine that evening, and feeling pretty relaxed, said: "Hey, Roy, you're looking very fit" - which, of course, he was.

Keane smiled at the compliment, so I then added: "And by the way, I always thought you would have made a great distance runner."

"Do you think so?" he replied, in that striking Cork accent, quite excited by the thought. "Why's that?"

Keane always had what we in running circles call "a great engine". I'd agreed this a short while before in conversation with Mark Carroll, someone I always felt bore an uncanny resemblance to Keane in terms of attitude and drive - and not just that striking Cork accent.

I told Keane this just as the lift reached the ground floor, and before moving away he said he knew Mark and asked how he was doing. When I explained he was doing okay but had some hip injury, Keane smiled again: "Tell me about it," he said, then walked off into the warm Dublin night.

That was almost five years ago, and it came to mind this week as I read John Inverdale's opinion piece on Keane in Wednesday's Daily Telegraph, the same day I happened to speak to Carroll on the phone from his training base in Tallahassee, the state capital of Florida.

Inverdale noted the now acclaimed changes in Keane, how he was the charmer at Sunderland, with one particularly sharp observation: "Chat to other top Irish sportsmen from disciplines as disparate as rugby and racing, they will all tell you how when they're instructing or coaching young up-and-coming stars, they offer Keane as the ultimate beacon to aspire to. His determination and commitment on and off the pitch were the epitome of the professionalism that so many current sportsmen fall short of."

He noted how in interviews Keane "doesn't shirk from answering the difficult questions, and he's happy to admit to mistakes. He talks like he played. And he has such charisma . . . The days of ranting and raging are long gone."

Carroll, I felt, was once similarly prone to such ranting and raging - only to become one of the real charmers of Irish athletics. He's happy to admit to mistakes and shares much of Keane's charisma. And if there was any bitterness towards athletics, which at one stage there no doubt was, Carroll has let it go.

In our many conversations over the years Carroll would inevitably raise the issue of drugs, often pointing the finger at those who had got the better of him in championship races. "Well, you know," he'd say, "if they weren't doing what they're doing ..."

When a fellow Corkman, Cathal Lombard, was himself busted for drugs four years ago, shortly after bettering Carroll's national 10,000-metre record, and claimed he took drugs simply to level the playing field, it almost felt as if Carroll's own achievement had somehow been scarred.

Yet Carroll's response was typically cutting: "I don't accept whatsoever Cathal's reasoning that he took EPO to level the playing field. We all know that people cheat, but in Cathal's case I don't think it was about levelling the playing field, it was about reaching the playing field ... And what he did over the last year just made me realise how good the stuff is."

And when Carroll was infamously dropped from the Irish Sports Council grants scheme shortly after the Athens Olympics he was truly raging: "Maybe instead of firing us, we should fire them," he said, referring to 'the blazers'. "What myself and others use the grants for is to fund the things we don't have in Ireland: the facilities we've never been able to get, the altitude training, the warm-weather training, the indoor arena."

At 36 he still hasn't given up the quest of qualifying for his third Olympics and will race over 10,000 metres in Stanford in early May in the hope of bettering the 27:50 A standard. Don't rule it out.

But as with Keane, Carroll's determination and commitment on and off the track remain the beacon for young up-and-coming stars, and also the accomplished ones, to aspire to.

It's almost impossible to find an Irish distance runner who doesn't cite Carroll as an influence, including the likes of Alistair Cragg and Martin Fagan. And just like Keane, Carroll is already putting his vast experience back into his sport.

When we spoke on Wednesday he had just walked off the track at Tallahassee after finishing a session with Gareth Turnbull, Liam Reale and Mark Christie - all of whom Carroll now coaches. This side role started by accident some three years ago when Turnbull first arrived to train with him in Florida. Reale, a fellow graduate of Providence College, joined last year, and Christie is the most recent addition.

"The coaching thing more or less fell into place by chance," explained Carroll. "I've made enough mistakes myself over the years, and one of the main things I'm trying to do with these athletes is make sure they don't repeat them.

"Athletics has always been a very compulsive sport, and it's very easy to run the s**** out of yourself. So what I'm really here for is to tell them what not to do."

He told me Turnbull is in great shape, and won't be far off the 3:36.60 1,500 metres A standard for Beijing, and nor will Reale, who endured a difficult 2007.

Christie is coming around after a period of overtraining and remains an exciting talent.

That same day Turnbull got word his long-running battle for compensation from the Irish Sports Council was over, though the bitterness of being wrongly accused of a doping offence will never truly disappear.

In saying goodbye, Carroll said he hoped to see me in Beijing, as either "coach or athlete", and I was left amazed by the enduring enthusiasm of this small enclave of Irish runners in sunny Florida.

There was a subtle but strong message in it all, and something Keane would have realised a long time ago: don't let them drag you down.