Small contingent for Valencia showpiece

ATHLETICS IRISH BUILD-UP TO WORLD INDOORS: NO ONE could disagree that the Beijing Olympics represent the single most important athletics meeting of 2008, so for the majority of Irish athletes that means next month's World Indoor Championships are an unwanted distraction.

Yet the downside to that is the shockingly small Irish team headed for those championships, set for Valencia, Spain, on March 7th-9th. James Nolan is the sole male qualifier and will run the 1,500 metres, while Derval O'Rourke is the only women's qualifier, in the 60 metre hurdles, although her participation still seems highly unlikely.

Athletics Ireland, however, are happy to give O'Rourke a little more time before she makes a final decision. Although the World Indoor entries officially closed last night, O'Rourke will run the small indoor meeting in Tampere, Finland, tomorrow evening, and if that goes particularly well she may yet defend her title in Valencia.

O'Rourke's two races so far this season have fallen well short of what she wanted, her best of 8.09 seconds a long way from her 7.84 national record, and ranking her only 34th best in the world this season. Unless she runs under eight seconds tomorrow it's expected she won't travel.

In the meantime Ailis McSweeney has been entered as a reserve, in the 60 metres flat. Although her season's best 7.38 seconds is just short of the official 7.37 qualifying standard, all competing nations are allowed enter one athlete on a wild-card basis, and if O'Rourke does not run then her fellow Cork athlete will instead complete the team alongside Nolan.

Even with the Beijing factor, a team of only two Irish athletes is disappointing. David Gillick, Paul Hession, Joanne Cuddihy and Roisín McGettigan have all chosen to focus on their Olympic preparations, while Alistair Cragg, who has run the fastest indoor 5,000 metres in the world this year with his 13:32.01, reckons the cross country season will better serve his Beijing ambitions, and travelled back from his US base yesterday ahead of Saturday's national interclub championships in Belfast.

Ireland had nine athletes at the last World Indoors in Moscow two years ago, with O'Rourke famously winning gold.

Nolan also made the final on that occasion, and his qualification for Valencia is something of a slap on the face to the high-performance grant scheme of the Irish Sports Council, who reckoned Nolan was washed up after the 2004 Olympics and therefore refused him any further grant aid.

Despite spending considerable money on improving coaching and developing juniors, Nolan, now 31, is still Ireland's best 1,500-metre runner, by some distance, and this raises some obvious questions about the judgment and accountability of the high-performance grants.

Bypassing the World Indoors is an understandable and yet somewhat risky strategy for Gillick and Hession, who last year appeared to base a strong outdoor season on their indoor rewards, which included a European Indoor gold for Gillick over 400 metres, and a series of national records for Hession over 60 metres.

Patsy McGonagle, team manager for both Valencia and Beijing, is not too perturbed: "No, I wouldn't be disappointed at the small size of the team," he says. "It was always going to be that way in Olympic year, because for our leading 15 or 16 athletes what matters most for now is training for Beijing."