MARY HANNIGAN'S OLYMPIC TV:WHATEVER MICHAEL Lyster and Joanne Cantwell are taking to make themselves so bright, breezy and fresh-faced on Olympics AM must, you have to assume, be on the banned substance list. Michael Carruth looked much more like how we felt, having risen at 5am to make it to Montrose in time for duty, and come the evening show, which started at 7pm, he was still there. With that kind of stamina he should be representing Ireland in the marathon tomorrow.

Andy Lee was Carruth's sidekick for the morning shift and it struck us that, if the US and British relay sprint teams exchanged their batons as smoothly as that fella talks boxing they'd be going home weighed down by gold.

To say we've been enamoured of Andy would be saying only the half of it; he's on that higher-punditry plane occupied by Michael Johnson, who talks athletics almost as sweetly as he ran it. But enough gushing. Apart from declaring that we've a soft spot for Carruth too. If we were him we'd probably have yearned for Darren Sutherland, Paddy Barnes and Kenny Egan to be stopped in their stride yesterday, just so his gold medal, which got up with him at 5am to accompany him to RTÉ, would remain peerless in Irish boxing.

But, Joanne told us, he couldn't sleep that night. "No I couldn't," he confirmed, "I'm a wreck at the moment here. It's like watching your brother fight, and I'd consider the three guys as our little brothers - they're part of our boxing family."

To help Michael and Andy warm up for the morning that was in it, they first had a look at Thailand's Somjit Jongjohor beating an Italian 7-1 in the flyweight 51kg semi-final.

Honest, if you ever told us we'd be watching Thailand's Somjit Jongjohor beating an Italian 7-1 in the 51kg semi-final before our boiled egg and soldiers were even incinerated we'd have said you were as mad as Olympic head honcho Jacques Rogge (although maybe he was joking when he said Ben Ainslie, in winning a third sailing gold, was the equal of Michael Phelps or Usain Bolt?).

Anyway, Carruth was well impressed by Jongjohor, and wasn't remotely put off by his waving to the crowd before the last round.

"That's the Thailanders," he said, "they kinda have that approach. We were in a training camp with them before the Barcelona Games - a bunch of headbangers, absolute headbangers. You didn't know if they were going to kick you, headbutt you or kiss you."

Sutherland, as it proved, mightn't have got kicked or kissed, but he got punched too many times by Britain's James DeGale to keep his golden dreams alive. "It was a walk in the park for me, it was easy," said DeGale.

May DeWind be in his face in DeFinal.

"An Olympic bronze medal! Come on, that's amazing," said Sutherland as he tried to console an inconsolable Marty Morrissey.

And it is amazing too, although Paddy Barnes was having none of it when it was his turn to chat to Marty a few hours later.

"He has more medals than an Irish dancer," Mick Dowling had warned us in advance of Paddy's opponent, China's Zou Shiming, while Carruth apologised for "painting a black picture" when he talked about Paddy's prospects.

And so it proved: 15-0 to Shiming. Nil?

"To not score a point was a bit embarrassing," Paddy said to Marty, "I hit him with a good lot of shots - I'm getting drug-tested, but it should be the judges getting drug-tested, not me."

Marty did his best to raise Paddy's spirits: "At the end of the day, you still have a bronze medal, you've done fantastically."

"I don't care," said Paddy, "they can keep the bronze medal for all I care, I don't want it. What's a bronze medal? It's for losers - you know what I mean?"

Mercifully, Paddy's Auntie Bridgin in Belfast felt much the same as ourselves, that an Olympic medal of any shade at all is a wondrous thing.

Next up, young Kenneth Egan. In truth he was never in trouble against Tony Jeffries, certainly not at the end of the third round, when he was 8-1 up. But Jimmy Magee spoke for a fearful nation when he warned: "Be careful about counting your chickens before they're hatched, even maybe before the eggs are laid." But, and forgive us, Jeffries's chickens came home to roost in the final round, Egan easing through, 10-3. What of his golden prospects against Zhang Xiaoping?

"Well, this China guy will have 10,000 people screaming for him, and they'll be screaming for his head if he doesn't win," said Carruth. And with that, after a mammoth shift, he left for home with his gold medal, telling it it might just have someone its own shade to play with very soon.