Irish effort hits new high

The metal detectors at Dublin Airport will be busy on Wednesday afternoon when the Irish Paralympic team arrive home bearing five gold medals, three silver and one bronze after 11 days of outstanding success.

As the curtain came down on the Paralympics, bringing to an end the 60-day festival of sport, the squad will have time to reflect upon an event that produced so many medals, their 31st place on the medal table giving all involved great pride in the most competitive Games to date.

Catherine Walsh got the ball rolling last Saturday, her bronze in the visually-impaired pentathlon opening the floodgates with Ireland securing eight more medals over the course of the week.

The golds came in athletics, boccia and swimming courtesy of Tom Leahy, Johnny Cronin and Margaret Grant, Gabriel Shelley, Mairead Berry and David Malone.

Berry added two silver to her gold to earn a hat-trick of medals.

The last medal for the Irish came on Saturday night when Mary Rice was awarded silver in the 800metres final.

Rice had actually finished third in the race, but was upgraded to second when the winner, Deborah Brennan of Great Britain, was disqualified for coming out of her lane.

That left Australia's Rebecca Felman in the gold medal spot, allowing Rice to go one better than the bronze she earned in Atlanta four years ago and keep her record of having won a medal in every major championship entered since 1995.

"I went into it pretty confident going into the race. I was aiming for bronze . . . It's wonderful," she said immediately afterwards.

Her sister Sharon, who was well beaten into fifth in the same race, was quick to congratulate one of her greatest rivals.

"I'm thrilled for her," was the response. "There's been a lot of hard work put in out there so she deserves it all."

Earlier in the day, Patrice Dockery ended her Paralympic campaign without the medal she so desperately wanted, but with much credit. Dockery took seconds off her own Irish record whilst finishing sixth in the 5,000-metres final and could well have had a top-three finish.

The race was won by Louise Sauvage, her second gold winning performance of the Games, but Dockery's tactics were spot on throughout and, but for a bump with two laps to go, seemed assured of a medal.

The 29-year-old dug deep within herself to make up the ground she lost in the collision and only just lost out in the sprint for the line. Afterwards, she preferred not to concentrate on the "what ifs", instead believing that the time of 12 minutes, 48.10 seconds felt like a medal in itself.

"I don't think you can fault my performance," she said. "I can't believe I reeled them back in. I just said this is it, I have to get back up there, I have to get back in there."

The Games themselves finished the way they started with another spectacular party. Fears the public wouldn't embrace the Paralympics after the highs of the Olympics fell by the wayside very quickly in Sydney with people turning up in their droves.

The cliche of "the most successful Games ever" had a new resonance last night and Athens will have a tough job coming close to matching this event.

In a week and a half of competition, over 1,100,000 sports-mad Aussies, the largest crowd ever and double the expectations, came through the turn-styles at Sydney Olympic Park.

Last night Stadium Australia was again full to the brim as the athletes received a send-off to remember.

The reception the Australians received was breathtaking, the host nation sitting proudly on top of the medal table after emphatically beating the British, who just pipped Spain for second spot.

And the efforts of the Irish team were not unnoticed, Micheal Cunningham, an eight-time Paralympian, receiving a generous ovation as he carried the flag into the Stadium.

The only blemish on a near-perfect Games for the organisers were the positive drug tests, 10 in all, a phenomenon not exclusive to able-bodied sport.

The biggest culprits were in power-lifting where nine competitors were caught. But the highest profile cheat was American 100metres silver medallist Brian Frasure who tested positive to the banned substance nandrolone.

In the lead up to the Paralympics, much had been made of the fact that Frasure is a training partner of Olympic 100m and 200m gold medallist Marion Jones with a mass of column inches dedicated to the sprinter.

The International Paralympic Committee (IPC) announced over the weekend that his A and B samples tested positive to the steroid during competition testing.

Officials have vowed to introduce even more stringent testing and punishment to combat the cheats.

"We've got to make sure our rules and regulations and sanctions are so strict that it will deter athletes from wanting to take drugs in the future," said Bob Steadward, chairman of the IPC.