Streets set to rattle and hum

THEY SAY that once the elite runners have passed there is a gap. Some minutes later a hum can be heard. Soon the hum becomes louder until the first runners appear on the horizon. It is the hum of tens of thousands of chatting women making their way through the Dublin streets. It is the hum of the women's mini marathon.

Tomorrow 28.864 women will generate the noise of the biggest event of its kind ever staged in Ireland. Each of the runners will average around £100 each for charity and the entire event will raise approximately £3 million for various organisations throughout the country.

Our Lady's Hospital for Sick Children, Crumlin, will hope to get £50,000 directly from sponsorship runs to go towards its annual £2.8 million bill. Other organisations, many of them children related, will benefit from an event that has moved from a time in 1983 when it was a rarity to even see women train on public roads to a race that, because of its success, has attracted enormous interest from others countries. Since its inception the race has raised close to £26 million for charitable causes.

The other mass competitive event, The Dublin City marathon, has never come near to attracting the same numbers that the 6.2 mile mini marathon has managed throughout its 15-year history. In 1980 when the Dublin City Marathon was first run it attracted 2,000 entrants with 60 women.

It was unheard of then that so many women would be interested in taking part in such a sporting activity.

In 1981 6,000 people took part and 300 were women. In 1982 there were 11,500 entries to the marathon and 900 of them were women. It was clear then that the landscape was changing with regard to women becoming more active and public in their sporting requirements.

Frank Slevin, Jim O'Brien and Eddie McDonagh along with the DSD Athletic Club in Dublin also saw the rapid evolution and a year later the first women's run was organised. They prayed that they would attract a field of 2,500. Nine thousand women entered. Their leap of faith was rewarded.

But what has caused the boom and why now are so many women interested in taking an active part? In a country such as Ireland where sport for women has had to fight with a great deal of vigour just to acquire an equal footing with men, tomorrow's run has become something of a welcome aberration, a behemoth that shows little sign of shrinking. It has not always been that way.

In 1928 the women's 800 metres Olympic final in Amsterdam touched off a major controversy in the world of athletics. After the race, which was won by German Lina Radke in a world record time (2:16.8) that would last for 16 years, several of the competitors collapsed at the finish line with exhaustion and had to be given aid by officials.

Anti-feminist zeal in the press and in the International Amateur Athletics Federation (IAAF) seized on the spectacle, which was actually a very common event in men's track races and also in rowing, as evidence that women should be banned for competing in any race over 200 metres.

The London Daily Mail quoted doctors who said that women who took part in races of 800 metres and other such "feats of endurance" would become old too soon.

The then president of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) Comte de Baillet-Latour also hit out in a fit of chauvinistic rage and spoke out in favour of eliminating all women's sports from the Olympics and returning to the ancient Greek custom of an all male competition.

The executive committee of the IAAF went on to ban women from taking part in races of over 200 metres and no women's race of more than half a lap was run at the Olympics for another 32 years.

The 800 metres made its return at the Rome games in 1960 where Lyudmyla Shevtsova took the gold medal for the Soviet Union, with the 1,500 metres arriving 12 years later at Munich in 1972. Again the Soviet Union provided the gold medal winner - Lyudmila Bragina.

It was to be another eight years before the women's marathon was to be accepted as part of the Olympic schedule in Los Angeles, the final acknowledgment that women's distance running was as much part of the Olympics as any other event. When American Joan Benoit, the inaugural winner and Norwegian Greta Waitz, the silver medallist ran the distance only IS minutes slower than the men's winner Carlos Lopes from Portugal and Ireland's John Treacy, it also indicated that the female metabolism was just as easily able to cope and nobody was becoming "old too soon."

IRELAND HAS had its own particular difficulties over the years in convincing figures of authority that women taking part in sport was not a corrupting pastime.

When, in the 1950s, Archbishop McQuaid spoke out against women, running with their legs bared and their families abandoned, religion weighed in alongside the more traditional brands of chauvinism of the time.

But with Benoit winning gold and Waitz having already won the first world marathon championship in 1983, distance running had made the break through and perhaps that in its own way triggered a global response from female athletes. In Waitz too, women's running had an articulate speaker and a remarkable athlete, arguably the finest female competitor in the history of running.

This week the world marathon champion, Olympic silver medallist, seven times winner of the New York marathon, the first woman to break the 2:30.00 barrier and five times World Cross Country champion is in Ireland to promote the race and to observe its success.

"I was an international for many years but I am at a different stage now. I'm happy to focus my efforts on getting more women interested in athletics. The sport is still run by too many men. It is important for women to support each other. You must give them an opportunity so that they can develop further in athletics. Women feel far more comfortable when competing in events organised exclusively for themselves," she says.

"It gives women the opportunity to train in the right sort of atmosphere. You set yourself a goal and no matter modest that may seem, it will be achieved by your efforts. That is important."

Tomorrow's race is competitive only for a fraction of the entrants. The winner is likely to come from a small group of people. The vast majority will walk, something that is reflected in the 1993 volume of entries. The number of women jumped from 14,700 in 1992 to 19,600 in 1993. From there on the field has increased at a staggering irate of around 2,000 per year.

"When we were planning that first race we were actually making a big break through for Irish women. We thought we would get a field of about 2,500 in the first year. We got 9,000," says race director Frank Slevin.

"It (the race) has never looked back. Women know now that this is their event. We can honestly say that we have given the lead to Europe in this respect. Ours is the perfect combination of the serious, and the fun element. We cater for runners, joggers and walkers - and each and every entrant is accorded the same level of importance.

"There is now a general movement all over Europe to stage such a women's event. But we are well ahead of the pack. We're not worried at all. There are a group of people who are hoping to organise nine events around Europe and by the year 2000 we are hoping that there will be a type of Grand Prix of women's events," says Slevin.

The race is about attaining individual goals and with the additional pressure of commitment to a charity, many of the competitors who start out on the programme keep it going until they have fulfilled their obligation to their chosen organisation.

But primarily it is the mood of the event that is engaging. It is inclusive and encouraging. The "Meet and Train" groups which provide the backbone of the preparation for most of the competitors is the antithesis of the way in which international standard runners such as Catherina McKiernan, Sonia O'Sullivan or last year's winner Katy McCandless go about their business. Single-minded, monastic intensity is lost in the social dimension and the chummy spectacle of taking over the streets of the capital for an afternoon every summer.

The race is a lure for those who want to lose weight without doctor's prescriptions or having to queue up at the treadmill in the local leisure centre.

In many ways too it is a rejection of the traditional sports in Ireland that have by-passed women or let them down completely. How many of the runners tomorrow are married mothers who have never been encouraged 19 take part in any type of sport since they left school 20 years ago? Even with some effort how many have been unable to assimilate into a sporting environment?

It is a phenomenon that may also be a reaction to the exclusively male country clubs and golf clubs that are only now opening their doors to women under the threat of reduced government grants and public ridicule. It is the culmination of years of sporting neglect and frustration, the reaction to the sporting apartheid that only in recent years has begun to be broken down in Ireland.

The mini marathon is unashamedly for women only. Probably for that reason it is such an unqualified success.