The one thing David Gillick won’t mind me admitting is my mostly ruthless speed-reading of the first half of his new book The Race. Especially when just back from a run and also busy in the kitchen cooking.
Because this is no reflection whatsoever on its content or startling honesty. Some of the early passages did stop me in my tracks. Not out of any surprise or wonder, but rather the sudden realisation it has been a long time now since those emotional days and nights in Madrid, Birmingham, Berlin and Barcelona.
Gillick starts The Race in the call room before the final of the 400 metres at the 2009 World Championships in Berlin. A few weeks before, he’d lowered the Irish record for the third time, running 44.77 seconds – the first Irishman to break the 45-second barrier and with that entering the realm of truly world-class athletics.
Here, inside the old Olympic Stadium still haunted by the ghost of Adolf Hitler, he has the chance to write more history. “I had done everything right in 2009,” he says, “and as I crouched in those starting blocks, waiting for that gun, I knew I was more ready than ever. It’s time to dance.”
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Without reading another line, and having witnessed it, I could still vividly recall what happens next as he finishes sixth. Same as the still vivid recall of every single one of Gillick’s championship races over the years, some of which were an absolute thrill to behold, others which left him and us wondering what might have been.
Four years before Berlin, Gillick became an overnight sensation, only to those who knew little about Irish athletics, when he won the 400m at the 2005 European Indoor Championships in Madrid. These weren’t just also formative years in my athletics reporting; Gillick to me was always the local boy coming exceptionally good – from the same club, Dundrum South Dublin.
Gillick rightly talks about the innocence of that time in Madrid, how “amid the ecstasy, I didn’t know what to do. Wave? Blow kisses? I’d never won anything like this ... someone ran down with an Irish flag, which I held up behind me for photographers, not realising it was the wrong way around.”
He also drops some hints about the fear and panic attacks and paranoia that would soon start to cripple his career at times, eventually tearing it down completely: “Madrid had been something I never expected. But when I came home and things settled down and I had time the think, my old insecurities reared their ugly heads. The impostor syndrome got stronger. Did I just get lucky? Did the stars align because everyone else ran shit on the day?”
The Race continues at a suitably swift pace through the highs and lows of the next few years, from the “difficult schooldays” of the 2006 World Indoor Championships in Moscow, to the early redemption of sorts when winning a second European Indoor 400m title in Birmingham in 2007.
Then the Beijing Olympics knocked him back again, when he bombs out of his 400m heat and says, “F***, now I’m going to be one of sympathy cases: an athlete who went to the Olympics and did nothing”, but in truth Gillick was only getting started on his rampage of self-hate. Berlin and Barcelona also come and go – the latter hosting the 2010 European Championship, where Gillick dives across the line in 45.28 seconds in fifth; 45.23 wins bronze.
After this The Race takes some of its darkest turns, and the second half of the book becomes essential reading. Gillick continually reaches out for more, moving from his training base in Loughborough to the small Florida suburb of Clermont, the scene of which further open his eyes and ears to the subject of doping. Cue more paranoia.
At the start of 2012, his prospects of making the London Olympics already shaky, Gillick read an interview (in this newspaper) with Martin Fagan, who’d run the Olympic marathon in Beijing. Fagan detailed the breakdown in his running career, and subsequent depression, which resulted in him buying and injecting himself with EPO, then testing positive.
Fagan’s confession divided opinion: to some, his struggle with depression should have nothing to do with doping; to others, it was an increasingly familiar tale of the conflicting pressures and anxieties that often make up the elite athlete.
For Gillick, it was clearly a case of the latter: “I could relate to what he [Fagan] said because I’d been at that low point, that desperate place, and while I could never condone doping ... I understood the slippery slope that had led him there. This sport, for all its beauty and brilliance, can truly break you: in mind, body and spirit.”
By the end of 2012, Gillick lost his Adidas sponsorship and Sport Ireland funding of €40,000, which is when everything went from bad to worse: he briefly worked for a shoe company, then found himself cut off in every sense.
“Although my job had links to Athletics Ireland, no one from there or Sport Ireland had formally reached out to see how I was doing after I’d stopped competing. As far as they were concerned, once your spikes were hung up, you sailed off into the sunset. Next.”
On his wedding day to long-time girlfriend Charlotte, in August 2014, he was seen crying, only people were “unaware that it wasn’t tears of joy, but a window into how hollow I was feeling.”
The state of his mental health descended with further cries for help, before the one he finally listened to himself: in December 2015, after he threw another tantrum in front of Charlotte, pregnant with their first child.
“How am I going to be a father to this baby? There was only one way I could: I needed help.”
Most people will know what came next for Gillick, the latest shining example being his post-race interviews for RTÉ at the World Championships in Tokyo. Sport Ireland now have support programmes for athletes in their transition into retirement, but The Race is an important and powerful reminder of that often bleak journey, and another of Gillick’s great victories.
The Race is published by Gill Books on October 23rd
