O'Dwyer still has time to recapture days of glory

ATHLETICS: What doesn't kill us can make us stronger. Ireland's most extravagantly talented high jumper has the chance to provide dramatic proof of the adage

MICK PYRO from the pop group Republic Of Loose persuaded me to buy the DVD boxed set of John Cassavetes, the pioneer of American independent film. It didn't disappoint. Cassavetes's fascination with human failures and the fragile securities of life makes for astonishing and compulsive viewing.

Each of the five films, particularly Opening Night, is a confrontation of personal and professional turmoil that results in often dramatic consequences, and it's a theme most of us can relate to. The setbacks and what we loosely term the disasters in life are what make us stronger, and no one was more aware of that than Cassavetes.

In many ways Cassavetes's work reminded me of Bud Greenspan, a more modest name in American independent film, who specialised mainly in sporting documentaries. His film of the 1984 Olympics, 16 Days of Glory, remains one of the finest of its kind.

Greenspan was also fascinated by human failure, perhaps even more than by the human success we associate with the Olympics.

Of the many stories woven through 16 Days of Glory, the most emotional are that of the American Mary Decker, who was infamously tripped during the 3,000-metre final, and that of the British world-record holder Dave Moorcroft, who narrowly avoided being lapped in the 5,000-metre final as he struggled with injury.

During moments such as these, Greenspan would focus his camera on the faces of the defeated - clearly aware these were defining moments in their lives, for better or for worse - and left us wondering how on earth they were going to deal with it.

It's often an Olympic failure or setback that makes an athlete stronger, and Greenspan was acutely aware of that.

There was a moment at the Athens Olympics four years ago that both Cassavetes and Greenspan would have found compelling, a moment that captured all the personal and professional turmoil that comes with Olympic failure. Four years on, that moment still fascinates all those that witnessed it.

On the hot night of August 20th, the first day of the track and field events in the gleaming Olympic Stadium, a 20-year-old high jumper from Kilkenny, Adrian O'Dwyer, strode into the infield area all charged up for his moment of glory.

O'Dwyer had little chance of winning a medal, but he was going to leave his mark on Athens nonetheless.

O'Dwyer had great style, and even greater presence. High jumpers are often renowned for colourful eccentricity, and O'Dwyer had that too, in abundance. This was his chance to tell the whole world he just might be the future of high jumping.

I had first come across O'Dwyer back in his schoolboy days at St Kieran's College. One year, at the Irish championships in Tullamore, he stole the show with his record-breaking leaps, in a way few field athletes have done, before or since.

"I'm going to jump very, very high," he told me afterwards, and it was impossible not to believe him.

By early 2004 he was rightly billed as our most exciting prospect in the event, and at the World Indoor championships in Budapest he improved his best to 2.25 metres - which, until the last round of jumps, had him in line for the bronze medal.

The Olympic qualification height of 2.30 still seemed beyond a 20-year-old novice who clearly had considerable room for technical and physical improvement.

But that summer he went to a small meeting in Algiers and cleared 2.30 on his second attempt. Typically, he had the 30,000-strong crowd in the palm of his hand, and he celebrated his Olympic qualification with some impromptu crowd-surfing.

Suddenly O'Dwyer became one of the most recognised new faces of Irish athletics, not least of all because of his fondness for Gothic dress and jewellery, which resulted in inevitable comparisons with Edward Scissorhands.

Beyond his size-13 feet and towering 6ft 5in frame, O'Dwyer's greatest asset was his personality - something that often comes with star potential.

He described his technique in almost magical terms: "When I am running towards the bar, everything is blank. My eyes are closed except for the last few steps and then I don't even look at the bar, more towards a point in the sky that I jump towards."

When he walked into the Olympic Stadium that night in Athens, O'Dwyer must have felt he had the whole world at his feet. The opening height in his qualifying group of 2.10 should have been a skip, not a jump. He failed it the first time. He failed it the second time, and now there was pressure.

He failed it the third time and he was gone - the only jumper in his group to "no-height" - forced to endure a lonely wait in the infield area while 37 other jumpers completed qualification.

For casual followers of Irish athletics, that was the last they heard of Adrian O'Dwyer.

Understandably, it took him a long time to recover from his Olympic trauma, longer than anyone could have imagined, and only now is that recovery truly underway. It may not see him back in time for Beijing, but there are definite signs O'Dwyer can still return to the world stage.

Initially, he spent some time in Canada, working with more specialist coaches, but throughout that period he was troubled with a chronic ankle injury, crucially in his take-off leg. It reached the stage where some people questioned whether the injury was actually in his head, but it was far from an act.

Unable to compete, he eventually lost his grant aid from the Irish Sports Council, and this was clearly a turning point.

He didn't give up on it. Some 15 months ago he went to Germany, the birthplace of his mother, Gudrun, for an operation that finally healed the injury.

He returned to Kilkenny, his father Paddy all the time encouraging him to stay at it.

Then last Christmas he linked up with the experienced Mayo-based coach Jim Ryan and started a more structured programme that in March saw him back competing at the Leinster indoor championships in Nenagh. O'Dwyer took three jumps: 1.90m, 2m and 2.10m just before straining the other ankle, this time the less crucial drive leg.

Despite this latest setback, Ryan is certain O'Dywer can make it back to the top. He remained impeccably lean and chiselled throughout his long absence from competition, and at 24 he has inevitably matured. His technique is still raw, but they say high jumpers peak at 28, the age O'Dwyer will be come the London Olympics.

For now, O'Dwyer's moment of Olympic failure is a timely reminder of how we need to manage expectations in Beijing in just three months' time.

When things go wrong in the Olympics, no one is more devastated than the athletes, and it can take them a long, long time to come back - often stronger than before.