ATHLETICS WORLD INDOOR:As the World Indoor Championships loom, IAN O'RIORDANlooks at what our top athletes have to put up with in the quest for medals

DOHA, QATAR. A city of one million people. Founded in 1825. Fiendishly hot for a lot of the year. Zero athletic tradition. And from Friday, for three days, the venue for the 13th World Indoor Athletics Championships

If staging these championships in the middle of the Persian Gulf seems a little strange, you probably haven’t heard of the Aspire Dome – the biggest indoor sporting arena in the world.

Built in just two years, with €770 million worth of oil money, and opened in November 2005, the Aspire Dome covers an area of 120,000 square metres, one of the many jewels in the rapidly expanding Doha skyline.

This is no ordinary indoor sporting arena. Designed by French architect Roger Taillibert, who crowned it with a split-sloping roof, the Aspire Dome houses an Olympic-size swimming pool and diving area; a full-size Fifa standard football pitch (yes, it’s indoor); a five-a-side football pitch; 11 tennis courts; a gymnastics hall; 13 table tennis courts; eight fencing strips; two squash courts; a judo and karate studio and seating for 15,000 spectators.

Not forgetting the 200-metre banked indoor running track, with a separate warm-up track. The Aspire Dome houses these 13 different indoor sporting facilities, all within a climate-controlled environment; and as if that wasn’t good enough, it also includes an array of sports science and medical facilities, such as a high altitude training lab.

That’s why Doha got to stage the World Indoor Athletics Championships – even though the only athletes competing for Qatar will be a bunch of imported Kenyans. (By they way, Qatar also bid for the 2016 Olympics, but failed to make the final shortlist. Not discouraged by that, however, Doha is currently bidding for the 2022 World Cup, promising to build all the football stadiums indoors because of their fiendishly hot climate.)

DUBLIN, IRELAND. A city of one and a half million people. Founded in 841. Fiendishly cold for a lot of the year. Great athletic tradition. And for almost 30 years, it’s still waiting for its first indoor sporting arena.

Actually the country as a whole needs an indoor arena now more than ever, given we’ve just endured the coldest, frostiest, snowiest winter since 1962.

Now, more than ever, we can only aspire towards something like the Aspire Dome.

The sad story of our failed quest to build an indoor arena has been told many times. For the record, it began in 1987 with the late taoiseach Charles Haughey unveiling the Government’s long-promised plan for a National Indoor Arena. After a feasibility study costing over one million of our old punts, one was approved for the Dublin docklands. It never happened.

Later, in 1999, then Jim McDaid, then minister for sport, unveiled grand plans for that same long-promised arena, this time to be built adjacent to the athletics stadium in Santry.

Never happened.

And in 2004, then minister for sport John O’Donoghue spoke proudly of the Government’s great new venture at Abbotstown, the centrepiece of which would be an indoor running track.

Never happened.

Even the Jamaicans have an indoor track. It wouldn’t be so shameful if Ireland still wasn’t producing athletes capable of mixing it with the best in the world. But in a sort of two-finger salute to this enduring void in Irish sporting infrastructure, 14 athletes have qualified for Doha this weekend – our largest ever team for a World Indoor Championships – spread across seven different events, including a real medal hope in David Gillick.

The only disappointment is that Derval O’Rourke, another medal hope in the 60 metre hurdles, had to withdraw with a hamstring injury. One can only wonder if she would have sustained the injury had she not been forced to do much of her training outdoors.

Brian Gregan is 20, in his second year of sports science at Dublin City University (DCU), and trains several nights a week on the outdoor track in Santry. From late December to late January, almost without fail, the track was covered in either ice or snow, but Gregan never once failed to complete a training session.

Instead the sessions began with his coach John Shields shovelling the snow off the track (with the help of some Clonliffe youngsters), while Gregan did his best to warm-up.

“It’s shocking, really, that we still don’t have an indoor facility,” says Gregan. “In January, most nights we were shovelling the snow off the track, and we didn’t always get to do the sessions we wanted. But I didn’t miss one. It was just some nights I wasn’t able to do them with the sort of intensity I would have wanted.

“You had to be careful not to slip, pull a hamstring, or something like that. Like everyone else, you just have to press on through these challenges.”

Last month Gregan ran 46.68 seconds in Vienna, knocking almost a second off his indoor best, to qualify for Doha. He’s still an exceptionally raw talent.

Gillick may be going to Doha with medal aspirations but Gregan has similar aspirations down the road. Inevitably he has looked towards the UK and the US, given their spread of indoor athletic facilities, but what did keep him in Ireland, reassuringly, was our coaching expertise

“It is harder for sprinters to make their mark in US colleges, but I never really wanted to leave my coach, John Shields. It’s been working here for a reason, and there was no reason to change that. The elite gym here in DCU is also very good, never too busy. But having an indoor track would make such a big difference.”

Indoor athletics is also a different beast to outdoor athletics and there’s a different momentum to indoor running.

“It’s more tactical, more physical,” says Gregan. “Even the breathing is different, as in more difficult, because of the air conditioning.

“Running indoors also feels like you’re running quicker, when actually you’re not, if that makes any sense.”

Deirdre Byrne won the National Indoor title last month over 3,000 metres. The championships were staged at the Odyssey in Belfast, where the indoor track is laid once every year, before the venue reverts to other more profitable purposes (concerts, etc).

A native of Wicklow, Byrne teaches at St David’s CBS in Artane, and also trains on the Santry track, while spreading her longs runs between St Anne’s Park and Dollymount Strand.

“I think for distance running, not having an indoor track doesn’t make as much a difference as it does the sprints, or technical events,” admits Byrne.

“Personally I haven’t found it a massive handicap. Obviously I would do a lot of running on the roads anyway, and once I get the speed work done on the track it doesn’t really matter whether it’s indoors or outdoors.

“The weather really is the big issue. Particularly this year. So really, no athlete out there could say an indoor track wouldn’t help them in some way. I think it’s great we’ve managed to qualify so many athletes for Doha. Think of the amount we’d qualify if we did have an indoor track.”

Gillick and O’Rourke have proven that success is possible, even without an indoor track. Gillick won his first European Indoor 400 metres title in 2005 while still training on the dark, wet nights at the Belfield track. He now benefits from the indoor facility at Loughborough University, his home since 2006.

For Kelly Proper, the 21-year-old who last month improved once again the Irish indoor long jump record, the thought of qualifying for Doha was what got her through the dark, cold nights of winter down at the Regional Sports Centre track in Waterford; an outdoor track, obviously.

“There were some nights,” she says, “when it was so cold that when you put on the spikes, because they’re so thin, your feet would just freeze. It was nearly impossible to run. That was very difficult. It would be handy to train indoors on those nights.

“But you just have to cope as best you can, with the best we’ve got. It meant trying to train around the weather, like when it wasn’t too bad. And to just get in as many sessions as you can.

“But it’s really up to the individual. If I didn’t train then I’m the one who suffers. That’s the way it is in athletics.”

Proper credits the spirit and pride of her club, Ferrybank, for motivating her and the dozens of younger athletes coming through: “I think Irish athletics is improving in a big way, which is why an indoor track is something we need very badly.

“I’ve seen some other countries, like Poland, and they have some great indoor facilities. And they have had them for 20 years. And we were always considered a richer country, although maybe not now. But when times were really good we should have put up at least one indoor track.”