Sonia O’Sullivan: More Irish athletes need winning attitude

It’s that time of the year again when athletes start reflecting on the season gone by, while also looking ahead to the next. The intensity of that refection is always raised a notch or two if the next year happens to be an Olympic year.

I often found myself looking ahead before the current season had even finished. I trained and raced in the more traditional method, and as the summer season of athletics went on my fitness would actually start to deteriorate. So I was already thinking about what I could do over the winter to make myself better for the next year.

As a result the mental focus was also getting less and less, and as the season headed for September I was just about hanging on, looking forward to my winter ‘break’.

These days it doesn’t appear that current athletes have such a dramatic drop in fitness as I used to experience. For me, there was definitely the peak and the low. I’m sure I could draw a graph of every year and it would look like a mountain drawn by a child; a pretty gradual climb to the best performances of the year; then a wash of super fast times and races; followed by a few survival races at the end of the season.

These were also the races where you reaped the rewards of the championship success, a sort of pay-back time. All the attention to detail was gone and it was a matter of survival, sometimes running races every second day, while seeking that last bit of competitive energy from the body and mind. But eventually the batteries wear down, and it’s time to rest.

Times are different now, and there are races all-year round: cross country, road, indoors, followed by the summer track season, featuring the Olympics, the European, or the World Athletics Championships, depending on the year.

In some ways this was always the case, but the difference is the weight of importance put on these races. It seems as if it is more evenly spread now, so instead of the peaks and troughs that I experienced, many athletes operate on a constant level of fitness. That should give them a pretty good result all-year round.

The European Cross Country Championships now take place in early December, and would have been a difficult time of year for the more traditional athletes like myself, who would be just getting started back training after their ‘break’. However these championships have now become an important event for breakthrough athletes.

The only problem is that part of the attraction of a European Cross Country Championships as a stepping stone to the next level is taken away when African-born athletes are allowed to come and share the start line, and in many cases steal the plaudits.

These are categorised as a European Championship event, and as a category I believe that only European-born athletes should be allowed to compete at the European Championships. The World Championships are different, as they are categorised as global, and so everyone fits the category.

Still, the Irish women’s team has certainly confirmed that they belong on the podium, winning with back-to-back bronze medals last Sunday, following on from a team gold medal won in 2012, and also team silver back in 2003.

It is this belief if you can work as a team as you stand on the start line that delivers medals. Irish athletes need to retain this belief, and also look at other ways to implement that winning attitude across all teams each year, searching for more success, without accepting the minimum level of success from a championship.

If you look at the women’s team that won bronze last Sunday, break it down, there is an interesting level of ability across the team. Four of them have already qualified in for the Rio Olympics next year: Fionnuala McCormack and Lizzie Lee both in the marathon, and Michelle Finn and Kerry O’Flaherty both in the 3,000m steeplechase.

What is especially interesting is that Caroline Crowley and Ciara Durkan were the third and fourth scorers on the team: without searching too far, what stands out is the potential of this team to inspire more Olympic qualifiers for Ireland, not just from within the team but also from those that have been on previous medal winning teams. Only two athletes returned from last year’s bronze medal winning team (McCormack, and Finn).

This is something that the athletes themselves need to realise, and now is the time to do something about it – to break down the qualifying times for Rio and work out a way to achieve them.

Only last week the IAAF released a revised schedule of qualifying times for Rio. For the women’s 5,000m, the qualifying time is now 15:24.00 (revised from 15:20.00), and this is an event where Ireland should have a full quota of three athletes qualified, provided some planning and action is taken by athletes who believe they are in the frame to do this. The marathon is currently over subscribed for Ireland with four already qualified, and the 10,000m is another opportunity that shouldn’t be overlooked.

When an opportunity like this is so obvious it would be such a shame to be sitting here this time next year reflecting on what might have been. At the Sydney 2000 Olympics, Ireland had three women qualified, all under the current standard, and one sitting at home, and that should not be an impossible dream to fulfil in Rio next summer.