They’re stacked on top of the desk in front of me here, piled up nearly a couple of dozen high. The sports books of 2025. Rugby, boxing, GAA, more rugby, athletics, soccer, cycling, yet more rugby. All of them windows into worlds unseen. Or worlds unseeable, maybe.
Do this job long enough and you become all too convinced of its limitations. You kid yourself that you’re a walking font of insight, that you know what makes sportspeople tick, that you’re a reliable narrator of their stories when you bring them to the outside world. In reality, the prosaic truth is that much of the time you don’t even know what you don’t know.
So it is that when you sit down to read David Gillick’s terrific book The Race, you are brought into a world you thought you knew. But, of course, you didn’t. Not really. The struggles that were playing out in Gillick’s head are at times so unsettling that you struggle to square it with the guy you covered for a while when he was at his peak.
I went over to meet him in Loughborough in the summer of 2008, around eight weeks out from the Beijing Olympics. We passed a perfectly lovely afternoon. He brought me to his house and made lunch and we chatted away for a couple of hours before he dropped me back to the airport. The resulting piece told of a guy who was happy and confident in himself, ready to hit his pinnacle at the Olympics.
READ MORE
He was at pains in it to warn people that a medal wasn’t really on the cards. But that wasn’t to downplay his effort – he was looking “to run the perfect race” in Beijing. Yet reading his book this week, he reflects on a diary entry from June 2008, about a week after the interview. He had broken the Irish record in a race in France and now he was warning himself to be careful of the added pressure that running well brings.
“That paragraph sums up my approach,” he writes. “I was never relaxed, always looking for more. I’d put pressure on myself to run well and if it happened, all I could think of was: ‘F**k, this is more pressure.’”
Eventually that pressure would tell in the run-up to Beijing. He developed mouth ulcers and a rash on his feet, brought on by the stress of heaping more and more pressure on himself. When the 45 seconds it was all leading to came around one Monday morning in the Bird’s Nest stadium, he didn’t even get out of his heat.
Gillick spent the days that followed wallowing in a torment of self-hate. It took him years to work through the feelings that told him he wasn’t good enough, that he was a failure, that he didn’t belong at the elite level of the sport. And when it was all over, he spent plenty of time beating himself up anew, this time over the fact that he wasn’t prepared for life after running.
Yet if you’d asked me at any stage through those years what David Gillick was like, I’d have told you he was a great lad, one of the soundest sportspeople you could meet. A smart dude as well, knows what he’s about. A fella who knew his limitations in a doped-up sport that has a global profile – and someone who was at peace with all that. Just a normal guy basically. Easy company.
But why? Because he’d made me a salad? Because he’d given me a lift and seemed relaxed and funny and sane over the course of an afternoon? What a thoroughly dopey conceit. And yet, some version of it is what drives all of sports media and fan culture and the intersection between them the world over.
After a decade of success, can Irish rugby continue to achieve?
People take a shine to this footballer or that golfer or the other athlete on entirely spurious grounds. They take a set against a jockey or a manager or a referee with equally unconvincing justification. Journalists form a view on sportspeople on the basis of snatched parcels of time here and there.
But then you read Gillick’s book or Andrew Porter’s book or Conor Murray’s book and you realise once again that you don’t really have the first clue as to what’s going on in the lives of some of Ireland’s most famous sportspeople. And yet we turn up and watch them and hand down our judgements all the same. We do it with conviction and even, we imagine, understanding.
In New York this week, Derryman Jude McAtamney has been the one thing you don’t want to be if you play for one of the city’s NFL teams – the player in the headlines after an excruciating defeat. McAtamney missed not one but two extra points in last Sunday’s insane defeat to the Denver Broncos. He made NFL history – it stands as the only time in the past 40 years of the league that a team lost a game by a point after their kicker missed two unblocked point-after-touchdown kicks.
And so McAtamney became the focal point in the fallout. Endless social media abuse, reams of actual media coverage, the butt of all jokes everywhere. He got cut from the Giants squad before being relegated to their practice squad, which brought a fresh wave of outrage directed at both him and the Giants management. It can only have been a brutal experience, one that it will be fascinating to hear him hopefully talk about one day.
Because right now, we have no idea what it must feel like to be McAtamney this week. We can guess that it hasn’t been pleasant but we know nothing beyond that. We don’t know what his state of mind was going in, what his nerves were like, how he spent the hours afterwards or the next day. For now, he still has a job and a career in professional American football, something only a tiny handful of Irish people have ever been able to say.
Can’t wait to read the book one day.
