Irish athletes not in the game

ATHLETICS:THE DANGER of stretching your Olympic ambitions too high is that they can always snap back in your face. Róisín McGettigan discovered that yesterday, when after making such a great effort to make the final of the 3,000-metre steeplechase she found herself tailed off early on and finished next to last.

Her time of 9:55.89 was some 25 seconds outside her best, but worse still, almost a minute behind the 8:58.81 Russia's Gulnara Galkina-Samitova ran to break her own world record and win the gold medal.

"That was not what I was hoping for," said McGettigan, bravely, honestly. "I felt so good two nights ago, but I felt so sluggish there. I was just not in the game. I don't know why that is. I don't know if I got too excited before the race and burned off the energy before I even got on there.

"I thought I had done everything right and I really thought I had it in me so obviously I was setting myself up for a disappointment when it didn't happen.

"I'm not going to lie, I'm disappointed. I'm just going to have to pick up the pieces and come back stronger."

If that was a nightmare, Derval O'Rourke experienced the true horror show; her sixth-place finish in the heats of the 100-metre hurdles in 13.22 seconds was half a second outside her best and 12 places short of qualification.

"That was terrible," she said. "For me running like that is just atrocious. All know is I have been feeling very bad, and have had really bad problems breathing. I just assumed it wouldn't affect me, but I've been on three inhalers, twice a day. It started before I got here, so it's nothing to do with being in Beijing.

"Even in the call room I was trying to convince myself I was okay, but I'm not going to stand here now and make excuses.

"I put myself out there, I'm responsible for how I run, and that was terrible. This is the Olympics and you have to be ready. And I wasn't, for different reasons. That's life."

It proved just as difficult for Michelle Carey when she finished seventh in her heat of the 400-metre hurdles, though the weekend was far from a write-off for the Irish as Robert Heffernan came home a highly creditable eighth in the 20-kilometre walk.

"I'd have mixed emotions," he said. "Of course I was thinking at one stage, yeah, there could be a medal for me here. I just knew I had to stay in the group, but I was just missing that little fraction in the end. I'm still only back two years, and last year I was like a kid after finishing sixth at the World Championships. But this has to be a better performance, because the Olympics are so much bigger."

Joanne Cuddihy did all she hoped to do in finishing her heat of the 400 metres after a season destroyed by injury: "This is the end of a long, long, difficult road. I'm really happy I got to run, and felt I owed it to a lot of people to be out there, after all the support I got. Going out there was a very difficult thing to do. The only way I would have been disappointed was if I hadn't given my all."