ATHLETICS:There is no finer moment in sport than Olympic selection, the calling to represent your country in the greatest sporting event, writes IAN O'RIORDAN
THEY SAY everything can be replaced. They say every distance is not near. But try singing that to the Irish marathon runner on Monday after she’s been told: “Sorry, you’re not actually going to the Olympics after all.”
It’s something only those in that position can ever understand, and the rest of us can only begin to. My close neighbour stopped by yesterday on his Bianchi and reckoned an athlete being selected for the Olympics must be like an actor being nominated for an Oscar: even if you don’t win anything, it’s an amazing honour, a career-defining triumph that stays with you for the rest of your life.
Missing out, or rather losing out, can be equally defining. Even those sadly flippant or even dismissive of this still noble and cherished prize can’t have ignored the moment this week when Katie Taylor realised she was, at last, safely qualified for London. “A dream come true,” she said, shedding real tears – suddenly and brilliantly illuminating that tired old cliché.
Because in sport, no matter what the cynics might think, there is no finer moment than Olympic selection, the calling to represent your country in the single most important sporting event on the planet. As if the several reminders of that in recent weeks, one amazing tale of qualification after another, sailors and shooters, canoeists and cyclists, weren’t powerful enough, the flip side, those who lost out, the men’s hockey team and the young boxer Joe Ward, were a reminder, too, of the unbearable realisation when the moment passes them by.
None of this should be forgotten once the Olympics actually get under way, because trust me, the same people who are kissing these qualifiers on the way up will be kicking them on the way down. Wait and see how many of these Olympians are suddenly the focus of some failure, or some other shallow analysis, as if they somehow weren’t good enough to be there in the first place. As someone once said, tread softly, for you tread on their dreams.
There’s no harm occasionally making light of it, in a self-deprecating sort of way, because when we were young and had no sense, we never appreciated the fact our dad competed in the Olympics. My younger brother famously drew this birthday card for him one time, a sort of life story in a dozen moments, the picture of him running in Tokyo in 1964 proudly declaring he “finished down the field”. Then there was the time my older brother cleaned his BMX bike with a dirty, green rag he found lying around the garage, which turned out to be the Irish vest our dad had worn in Tokyo. That incident didn’t go down quite as well as the birthday card – but we all laugh about it now, knowing the real pride was in the heart, not the vest that decorated it.
We do appreciate it now, more so every time the Olympics roll around, and I think he does too. Sure, he has some regrets, and often tells me he wished he’d trained harder, prepared more specifically, but youth and naivety is a potent mix, and not long down from the Rocky Mountains where he’d been to college, still finding his feet in Dublin, it was hard to know what to expect in Tokyo, and he wasn’t the only one. He certainly doesn’t regret being there, even if he watched from the stadium seats as the American Bob Schul, someone he frequently equalled in training, won that Olympic 5,000 metres, in 13:48.8.
What he does regret was not being selected for Mexico, four years later. Something about that still hounds him, not just because he was unlucky to miss out: the qualifying standard was set at 13:24.0, for three-miles (the 5,000m equivalent), and he ran 13:24.8, solo, in Santry, early in the season, presuming the time would come later. Instead, he never came as close – Mexico came and went. It’s not that he could have run better, but would have: he has little doubt the experience of 1964 would have made a difference in 1968, even with the high altitude of Mexico, and the resentment, purely personal, is he never got the chance to prove it.
Of the four Irish women with the marathon A-standard for London, only Maria McCambridge has run in the Olympics before, but otherwise they’re virtually inseparable. They’ve each taken different qualifying paths to London, these journeys now well aired: Linda Byrne the first to qualify, Ava Hutchinson next, then McCambridge and finally Caitriona Jennings.
The flawed selection policy of Athletics Ireland has been well aired too, although there’s no perfect way of deciding which athletes are sent when more than the permitted three per event have qualified.
Things could have been planned a little better, and last July, a year before London, and on these very pages, Jim Aughney, race director of the Dublin Marathon, outlined his frustrations that the Olympic Council of Ireland wouldn’t agree to Dublin acting as some sort of trial for London, so in fact Athletics Ireland aren’t entirely to blame here.
No point crying over rotten tomatoes, although bringing forward the original selection of deadline from June 12th to next Monday is a minor consolation. To be fair, they had to wait on Barbara Sanchez, who is running the Copenhagen marathon tomorrow, because it would have been a bigger mess if she runs under the 2:37:00 A-standard, and wasn’t considered at all.
How likely is that? I don’t know, because like most people I don’t know much about Barbara Sanchez. Born in Bordeaux, to Spanish parents, and a former triathlon specialist in France, she came to Ireland in 2005 to complete a Masters degree, has lived here ever since, and now has Irish eligibility.
What is certain is that Sanchez is going to have to run something special to eclipse the four qualifiers already lined up for London. Either way, all Athletics Ireland have to go on now is that vague selection criteria – consistency and repeatability of performances in 2011/12; relevant statistical data/rankings; athletes “on-demand” performances at previous championships; competitive record of athletes against one another; and athletes “final phase” readiness (and good luck with that). Those officials making the selection, by the way, are Ray Flynn (high performance chairman), Kevin Ankrom (high performance director), Jim Kidd (coaching chairman), Patsy McGonagle (London team manager), and Jacqui Freyne (director of coaching).
I’ve said it before that Byrne, Hutchinson, McCambridge and Jennings have all run similar times, are frequent training partners, and – to top it all – good friends, and now one of them must make way for the other three for a place in the Olympic marathon. No one would fancy making that selection, but rather than any criteria, I would simply ask which of them are most likely to deliver the strongest possible performance in London – and at least that would give me one obvious pick.
