New golden era looks to be on the right track

ATHLETICS:I bumped into Kevin Nolan this week, a man who has forgotten more about Dublin GAA than I'll ever know, but whose total recall of Irish athletics begins around 1980, then finishes six or seven years later.

In that sense he’s certainly not alone. He’d heard about this new indoor track just opened in Athlone, and we began mainlining the nostalgia like two hopeless junkies, those dreamy Saturday mornings, waking up to the reruns of Eamonn Coghlan, Ray Flynn, Marcus O’Sullivan, on the boards at the Meadowlands, Madison Square Garden, the Millrose Games, and another Wanamaker Mile won by an Irishman.

We could remember the commentary of Coghlan’s world indoor mile record, in 1983, when he burnt off, from the front, an all-star field, clocked 3:49.78, which stood for 14 years before it was finally broken by Hicham El Guerrouj, and still we promised to watch it all over again on YouTube that night.

And wasn’t it 1987, the first World Indoor Championships in Indianapolis, when Ireland sent a team of four athletes, and Coghlan – the gold medal favourite – fell in the 1,500 metres, only for O’Sullivan to win gold anyway, before Frank O’Mara and Paul Donovan went one-two in the 3,000 metres?

“Someone needs to write the book, even make the film”, we agreed, the only problem with that being this so-called golden era of Irish indoor running didn’t just begin in 1980, nor finish six or seven years later. It began 30 years earlier, in 1950, when John Joe Barry, better known as the Ballincurry Hare, won the US indoor mile, paving the way for a generation of great indoor milers.

Then, Ronnie Delany, having followed Barry to Villanova, won his first indoor race in 1956, went unbeaten indoors over the mile until March 1959 – also breaking the world indoor mile record on three separate occasions, lowering it to 4:01.4, in 1959.

This continued during the 1960s, the likes of Frank Murphy, and Noel Carroll, who helped Villanova break a world indoor record in the 4x800m, and there’s a picture in my parent’s house of another Irishman setting a European indoor three-mile record, of 13:38.0, in the old Madison Square Garden.

Then Coghlan arrived, in 1974, promoted to Chairman of the Boards: he also broke the world indoor mile record three times, won a then record seven Wanamaker Miles, averaging 3:55.79, won 52 of his 70 indoor races, then famously came back in 1994 to run the still only sub-four minute mile indoors by a man over the age of 40.

Indeed, the only man that comes close to Coghlan’s indoor record is Marcus O’Sullivan, who won six Wanamaker Miles, three World Indoor 1,500m titles, and one of only three men on the planet to run more than 100 sub-four minute miles, 47 of which were actually run indoors.

The other problem with all this nostalgia is it tends to repeat itself, although still, our great indoor tradition didn’t end there. Sonia O’Sullivan should have won World Indoor gold in 1997, but got squeezed by Gabriela Szabo, then came the new generation, David Gillick and Alistair Cragg both winning European Indoor gold medals on the same night in Madrid, in 2005, before Derval O’Rourke won Ireland’s only global sprint title, winning the 60m hurdles at the World Indoor Championships in Moscow, in 2006.

This, lest anyone forget, was played out against the sound of a broken record, the calls, pleas, promises that Ireland build itself a proper indoor running track.

The facility in Nenagh, opened in 1990, served its purpose, but was never purposely built, while grand plans for an indoor arena in the Dublin Docklands, then Santry, then Abbotstown all disappeared like water running down a drain.

And all of which explains why, last Wednesday, after more than 30 years of waiting, when the doors were opened on the six-lane, IAAF-standard, beautifully finished indoor track at the Athlone Institute of Technology, Coghlan himself declared it “the most historic day in Irish athletics”. What he meant wasn’t just the link to his own era, but the start of a new era. “It’s not about getting soft, running and training outdoors, no matter what the conditions,” he told me, “it’s about encouraging, inspiring, our athletes to run fast, race more, bring back some of the excitement, the buzz, that was there in the 1980s, especially around indoor running.”

For that we can all thank Ciarán Ó Catháin, president of Athlone IT, and also now president of Athletics Ireland, who grew up in that era, ran with Donore Harriers, hearing that same broken record. So he pursued this dream of building an indoor track with the same stubborn zeal Abe Lincoln shows in the new Spielberg film, trying to secure the 13th Amendment.

That’s what the fuss is all about, not simply the opening of an indoor track, but the chance now for young Irish athletes to stage this new era, set records, like running the first sub-four minute indoor mile in Ireland, and why tomorrow’s Indoor Games in Athlone, an event which normally didn’t register on the Irish athletics calendar, is so excitedly anticipated, and surely now some fresh nostalgia in the making.