Hammer thrower aiming to make her mark

The Irish Times/Mitsubishi Sportswoman of the Year award: The rise of Eileen O'Keeffe through the ranks of women's hammer throwing is already so surreal it's impossible to predict what will happen next - but if things keep going the way they are then it's only a matter of time before the Kilkenny athlete makes her presence felt at the highest level.

O'Keeffe enters the Olympic Stadium in Helsinki later today aiming to become the first Irish woman to produce a hammer throw beyond 70 metres. If we can pause there for a second, that's a matter of throwing a 10lb ball of steel almost the length of a football pitch. Needless to say technique is paramount.

She'll require a 70-metre throw just to make the final, yet O'Keeffe's journey to Helsinki in recent weeks has made her the deserving July winner of The Irish Times/Mitsubishi Electric Sportswoman of the Month.

Considering she's just turned 24, is exclusively self-taught and still has no coach, there is still vast potential for improvement.

Her rate of progression this summer alone has been remarkable. Five years ago, just after taking up the event, O'Keeffe threw her first Irish record: 57.17 metres. She's improved on that distance every year since, starting this season with a best of 64.66 metres - and then went on her July record spree, breaking the Irish mark on three weekends in succession. She appeared to peak at the national championships when she threw 68.14 metres, but she improved again, to 69.36, at the Dublin International in Santry.

That mightn't be so astonishing if she'd been enjoying access to top-class facilities and coaching. But it's when you recount how O'Keeffe has got this far that things start to sound surreal.

She was introduced to the sport during her last years at school in Kilkenny, and then became hooked when her elder brother chanced upon a hammer-throwing video in the local "pound shop". After the first viewing she was determined to perfect her technique.

With nowhere to train, her father helped lay a cement throwing circle on the family farm, and it was there O'Keeffe slowly developed the range of complicated techniques necessary.

After the first few months of trying, she qualified for the World Junior Championships in Chile, and a year later the 2002 European senior championships in Munich - all the time learning by watching her opponents.

"You think your technique is grand," she explains, "and then you go abroad and a German thrower will say to you, 'What are you doing with her hands? They're too low,' or it's 'Your release is all wrong'. That's how I've learned everything I know."

She's made other adjustments this year that have taken her closer to world class: she has taken time off from long nursing shifts at Tullamore hospital; she has also taken on the expertise of John Hargrove to develop a proper weight-training programme. Incredibly, she was told earlier in the year the Irish Sports Council were still cutting her grant, only for sense to prevail on appeal - and she got €11,500.

Next month she's due to start a hDip at the Royal College of Surgeons, but deep down she knows the only way to the top is proper coaching, in a proper environment: "Right now I'm not too far off the top throwers in the world. Before this year my distance was all coming off my speed. What I didn't have was the power behind it. It's a matter of putting the two together, which I'm only starting to do now."

O'Keeffe displays what throwers call "natural spin-ability" yet her training is still absurdly handicapped. She can't practise at the national athletics stadium in Santry because the infield has to be protected for soccer matches.

It's a little premature to suggest she can restore Irish throwing to the great heights of the past - remembering that Dr Pat O'Callaghan won Olympic gold in 1928 and 1932 - but she at least deserves every chance.

Today O'Keeffe goes in the second of the two qualifying groups, where 10 of the 18 throwers have already cleared 70 metres. She won't be helped either by the fact women's hammer-throwing is undergoing a resurgence, with Tatyana Lysenko of Russia - who last month improved the world record to 77.06 metres - among her opponents.

Qualification is based on the 70-metre standard, or else the 12 best qualifiers. It's likely she'll need to throw well beyond 70 metres to make Friday's final.