Blame it all on Eamonn Coghlan. Some of us are now at the age to remember when Coghlan’s gold medal at the first World Championships in 1983 came at that most impressionable time of our young lives, perhaps luring us into believing it might always be this way.
Coghlan has told the story many times before of how he went into the 5,000m at those championships fired up by his near missing of medals at the previous two Olympics, finishing fourth in Montreal in 1976 and again in Moscow in 1980. Not winning a medal of any colour in Helsinki would have defined his career in an entirely different light.
Those first World Championships proved to be a turning point in the career of another Irish athlete. John Treacy finished in 11th place in his qualifying heat in Helsinki, his time of 28:35.58 was miles outside his Irish record. Treacy knew something had to change after that, gently informing his wife Fionnuala of his idea to move back to the US along with their young daughter.
By the time Treacy returned to Dublin, Fionnuala had already sold their Ford Capri and rented out their recently bought home in Dundrum. Exactly one year later, after finishing ninth in the 10,000m in Los Angeles, Treacy also made his debut in the marathon, and the rest is Irish Olympic history.
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Originally the World Championships were every four years, and there were early doubts after their lasting viability in 1983. So the then governing body, the IAAF, announced it would pay the travel expenses of all competitors, with Helsinki providing free room and board. It worked as 1,355 athletes travelled, from 153 nations, more than double the 70 nations that contested athletics at the boycotted Moscow Olympics.
After an equally successful championships in Rome in 1987, by the time of the third one, in Tokyo in 1991, the IAAF had already agreed to stage them every two years.
Still, it took until the 1993 Championships in Stuttgart before Sonia O’Sullivan won a second medal for Ireland, winning silver in the 1,500m. The story of those championships has also been told many times before. Despite their complete lack of global championship experience, three Chinese women coached by Ma Junren – who were also known as Ma’s Army – won all three medals in the 3,000m, led home by Qu Yunxia, relegating O’Sullivan to fourth.
Six days later, O’Sullivan did manage to break the Chinese dominance in the 1,500m, winning silver behind Liu Dong. Then according to Chinese state media reports, released in February 2016, all nine of Ma’s Army medal winners in Stuttgart were forced to take “large doses of illegal drugs over the years”. A letter, signed by Wang Junxia and her eight team-mates in 1995, also detailed the regime of state-sponsored doping.
For many, O’Sullivan should already have been a double World champion, before she won the 5,000m two years later in Gothenburg. By Athens 1997, however, her career was continuing to wobble as she missed out on the final in the 5,000m and finished eighth in the 1,500m.
Two years after that, in 1999, this correspondent made his World Championship debut for The Irish Times newspaper in Seville. They proved to be the mostly lean years for Irish athletics on the global outdoor stage. The only Irish finalist in Seville was Mark Carroll in the 5,000m, finishing back in 14th, and my more abiding memory of that week was playing my new flamenco guitar on the steps on the city’s cathedral.
O’Sullivan missed Seville and the 2001 World Championships, while giving birth to daughters Ciara and Sophie, majestically bridging those years by the winning the Olympic 5,000m silver medal in Sydney.
At World Championship level, however, the 30-year wait to win another medal on the track has continued – the last three Irish medals all coming in the race walks.
The first of those came in 2003, when Gillian O’Sullivan from Killarney defied the Parisian heat to enter the Stade de France in second place in the 20km walk – her silver medal just reward for her years of perseverance.
Two more World Championships – in Helsinki and Osaka – came and went without me having much to write home about, before in Berlin in 2009 Olive Loughnane was also rewarded for her steady progression with gold in the 20km walk, promoted from silver after Russia’s Olga Kaniskina was later banned for doping.
That may have taken from Loughnane’s moment of glory on a searing hot morning at the Brandenburg Gate, but it would have been far worse if that original result were allowed to stand – the stray cats on the streets of Berlin knowing how dirty Russian race walking was.
Also in Berlin, Derval O’Rourke finished fourth in the 100m hurdles, running a national record of 12.67 seconds, and David Gillick also produced arguably the best outdoor 400m performance of his career (short of his Irish record) to nail sixth place in the final. For the first time Irish athletics was starting to demonstrate some real depth across a range of disciplines, especially beyond the distance events.
Fast forward another four years to Moscow in 2013, where Robert Heffernan found his gold medal redemption in the 50km walk, at age 35, a year after also finishing fourth in the Olympics (later promoted to bronze after another Russian doping ban).
Yet more lean championships followed, before in Budapest two years ago, Ciara Mageean and Rhasidat Adeleke both finished fourth on successive nights – Mageean over 1,500m, then Adeleke over 400m.
Another turning point in Irish World Championships history perhaps, but still no one could have predicted two Irish medal chances going into the penultimate day of action in Tokyo, Kate O’Connor sitting in the silver medal position after day one of the heptathlon and Cian McPhillips the joint fastest qualifier in the 800m.
Those medals will be decided within just over an hour on Saturday, and no matter how things turn out, they’ve already left a strong impression on young Irish athletes. And perhaps lured some of us into believing it might always be this way.
