Fagan's fate has more twists than Oliver

On Athletics:By now you may have heard the story of Martin Fagan, the Irish athlete who was last month refused entry into the US after competing at the European Cross Country Championships in Spain. Since September, Fagan had been based at Flagstaff in Arizona, training to run inside the Olympic marathon qualifying time of two hours and 15 minutes.

Tomorrow's Houston marathon was his targeted race and everything was going to plan, or so it seemed. On October 7th he finished third in the Boston half-marathon, clocking one hour, three minutes and four seconds - which strongly suggested a sub-2:15 marathon. Fagan also finished second in a high quality five-mile road race in Connecticut on Thanksgiving Day, after which he was selected to run for Ireland at the European cross country on December 9th.

Although that wasn't ideally suited to his marathon preparations, the year before he'd been forced to withdraw through illness, and Fagan, always keen to run for Ireland, was determined to make amends. So he took several different flights to get from Arizona to Spain, led the race up until the last mile, and ended up seventh - Ireland's best ever placing in the senior men's race.

The following day he started the long journey back to Arizona to resume his marathon training. At 24 Fagan was coming into his sporting prime, and while some people thought he was still too young for the marathon, he always knew it would be his best event, even back in his schoolboy days in Mullingar, and definitely his best chance of getting to Beijing next August.

What happened then will go down as either fortune or ill fate - as next Friday will tell - because Fagan never made it back to Arizona. Instead he only got as far as Philadelphia, and just before boarding his last flight, was told his US visa was not in order. With that ended his Plan A to run tomorrow's Houston marathon.

Effectively Fagan should have been let through as he was still on a one-year extension of his student visa, which he held throughout his five years on scholarship at Providence College in Rhode Island. But when quizzed by the US immigration officer, Fagan explained he was effectively a professional athlete, which he didn't realise now requires a special visa, costing $5,000, and taking three months to process.

Fagan was told he'd have to take the next flight back to Dublin, which at least US immigration is obliged to pay for. The flight they offered was two days later, and that meant 48 hours in a holding cell. No thanks, said Fagan, and he ended up paying for his own flight in order to get out that same evening.

That's now the nightmare scenario for a lot of Irish trying to get into the US, legally or otherwise, and Fagan wasn't the first Irish athlete to experience it. Last year, Liam Reale, another former scholarship athlete at Providence, was refused re-entry after competing at the European Championships in Gothenburg, and in 1987, Paul Donovan was also refused re-entry shortly after winning the silver medal at the World Indoor Championships in Indianapolis. I know that because Donovan ended up staying in our house for several weeks as a result.

Yet Fagan didn't give up hope, and back in Dublin, Irish team manager for Beijing, Patsy McGonagle, arranged a meeting with the US embassy in an effort to secure him a temporary visa. When that failed, Fagan came up with Plan B. His agent, Ray Flynn, looked at his calendar and saw the Dubai Marathon is run around the same time, taking place next Friday. Athletics Ireland arranged for him to join their warm-weather training camp in Portugal, where he's spent the past fortnight concluding his scheduled training programme as best he could.

Fagan returns to Dublin tomorrow, and will head to Dubai on Tuesday, still confident he can run inside the 2:15 qualifying time. He reckons his training in Arizona took him close to 2:10 shape, and while he has been a little upset by events of recent weeks, if he paces himself right in Dubai next Friday then the sub-2:15 is definitely still on.

I'm not so sure. One of the main reasons Fagan moved to Arizona was to avail of the high altitude training at Flagstaff, which lies at 7,000 feet. There is still some uncertainty as to the exact benefits of such methods, which is generally defined as training anywhere above 5,000 feet. (Unfortunately, the best we have to offer is the 3,406 feet of Carrauntoohil.) The latest research suggests it's better to live at high attitude but train at lower altitudes, which could be worth improvements of around 10 seconds for every 5km of running.

In failing to get back to Arizona, Fagan has already missed out on that potential benefit, but the biggest problem about running in Dubai instead of Houston is the Dubai marathon includes Ethiopia's Haile Gebrselassie, who was born and raised in the village of Asella (7,950 feet), trains in the Entoto mountains outside Addis Ababa (which reach 9,850 feet) and therefore reaps the maximum benefits high altitude offers the distance runner.

Gebrselassie intends on running a lot faster than 2:15. In fact he intends on breaking his world record of 2:04.26 set in Berlin last September, which if he does, will earn him a $1 million (€681,000) bonus - which is a world record in itself. Fagan would be foolish to go with that pace and he knows it. He'll run his own race even if that means running alone, and he certainly won't lack inspiration. Yet somehow those few words back in Philadelphia airport seem more ill fated than fortunate.