There are some early markers Derval O’Rourke wants to lay down on all matters Hall of Fame when we meet up. It begins with her near-complete aversion to sporting awards of any kind, knowing full well how fickle they can be.
The judging panel at the RTÉ Sportsperson of the Year awards back in 2006 helped make sure of that.
She also says when she retired in June, 2014 – a month after turning 33 – she felt her career was a failure because she never won an Olympic medal. Which is harsh, although in the end no one held O’Rourke to higher standards than herself.
Her three Olympic experiences ended in varying degrees of disappointment. No disputing that. The five championship medals she did win, the first ever by an Irish woman in the sprint hurdles, set her apart then and still do. This is especially the case as O’Rourke spent much of her career raging against the cracks in Irish high-performance systems.
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She has softened on those things now, perfectly content in her Cork family life, yet still razor-sharp on what is required to succeed in any sport. And if any Hall of Fame is partly based on surviving one battle after another, O’Rourke earned it long before her induction at the Athletics Ireland awards in Dublin next Wednesday.
“Awards were never my game, I just loved to run fast,” she says. “It’s just nice for everyone else; to get a Hall of Fame now is as much for them. My coaches, Seán and Terri Cahill, my parents, and a number of people who were outrageously good to me throughout my career.
“When I retired, I was genuinely ecstatic to be done. And relieved. I’d had Achilles surgery in August, 2013, four weeks before my wedding. I had loads of injuries throughout my career. And I was just managing them for so long. The biggest relief was that I didn’t have to fight for things any more, advocate things.
“There was still a lingering sense of disappointment that I didn’t win an Olympic medal. I’d had this thing in my head to have an incredible performance at every championships. I did that in four of the five. I just never did it in the Olympics. That’s the only one.”
Then there are the medals O’Rourke was unquestionably denied by athletes who were doping, even if one, the European indoor bronze in 2013, was awarded retrospectively. She wasn’t the only Irish athlete to face that battle and she never let it eat her up either.
“There are so many things you need to do to run fast; all you can do is focus on yourself. If you’re doing everything you can to win, then it comes down to that moment, the moment that gun goes. You can’t control anything else.
“With the systems and structures we had in place, realising any medal in any championship is pretty impressive. Because I also think, during my time, we were never very good at performance management. That was a problem. The size of our population, whatever talent we have, you have to nurture and mind.”
O’Rourke started defying the odds early in her career, rarely letting up. Coming out of the Cork suburb of Douglas to join Leevale AC, at 22 she became the first Irish woman to break 13 seconds for the 100m hurdles. Progress then began to stall. Her first Olympic experience, in Athens in 2004, was a painful one. A vicious bout of food poisoning four weeks before the Games left her hopes in tatters.
“There was very little empathy and kindness. The question wasn’t ‘what went wrong?’, it was ‘why were you so bad?’. I understood I needed to leave Cork, move to Dublin, but at 19, 20, if you’re not in the right structure at that stage, it can be catastrophic. I had to survive that and just about did.
“So at the end of 2004, I decided to put the pieces of the puzzle together myself. And I emailed Sonia O’Sullivan. I didn’t know her at all, [but] she put this really good response together, asking about my nutrition, my gym work. Her advice was all about taking ownership, that it’s your job now. No one is saving you.
“I also was part of a Dublin sprint group that wasn’t really fit for purpose, and that’s when I reached out to Seán Cahill, in 2005. Seán was my last step before retirement. I’d also started Smurfit Business School, realised if I’m not going to get a real job, I’ll have to work incredibly hard at this.”
Cahill competed at the 1996 Olympics in the 110m hurdles, while his wife Terri was an international long jumper. Neither were keen to start coaching a young athlete like O’Rourke, but she wouldn’t hear otherwise.
“Seán came down to Santry, took one look at me and shook his head. I can take bluntness, he just said ‘the bad news is your technique is terrible, but if you can improve it, you could be very good’.
“He said a few things like that, they were incredibly impactful. So we started making small changes, one at a time, Terri brought her sports science background, and suddenly it just clicked.”
The suddenly being at the World Indoor Championships in Moscow, in March 2006, where she improved her Irish record in every round, finishing off with a brilliant 7.84 in the final to win the gold medal. Top American Danielle Carruthers was fourth and Jamaican Lacena Golding-Clarke finished sixth, almost falling over in her effort to catch O’Rourke.
The country was still seven years away from building its first indoor arena.
“That completely changed the direction of my life. Before, no one really cared. Then I was on The Late Late Show within seven days. Athletics was the love of my life, but suddenly there were a lot more people with a vested interest.
“The work ethic, the mental approach, that’s one thing. But you also need to be minded. There just wasn’t enough of that and things went out of control at times. I never cried coming off the track, I think I had to appear bulletproof, but I was always vulnerable away from the track, definitely.”
She carried that form through to the 2006 European Championships in Gothenburg, winning the silver medal in the 100m hurdles – only the second Irish woman to make that podium after O’Sullivan.
With that, O’Rourke found herself live on RTÉ at the end of the year, where the Sportsperson award was voted on by that panel; Eamon Dunphy, George Hook, Cyril Farrell and Ted Walsh listed off all the reasons why O’Rourke shouldn’t win, while Jerry Kiernan and Pat Spillane tried in vain to convince them otherwise.
The award went to Kilkenny hurler Henry Shefflin.
“Yeah, Jerry was fabulous, so was Pat Spillane. I did obviously think I was going to win, but if you look back at that period, there were very few women in leadership positions in sport. So six men on the stage, it was no different to what you’d see everywhere else. All the decision makers were male.
“There was also another article written about me around the same time, and the insinuation was I was just lucky in Moscow. My system at the time wasn’t that robust, that got into my head. It was a slide then for about two years, the punches just kept coming. By the end of 2008, I was very low, just had to find the joy again.”
Her second Olympic experience, in Beijing in 2008, was only marginally improved, although far from a wasted trip. On the flight home she was seated beside Irish Olympic sailor Peter O’Leary, also from Cork. That romance would later blossom into marriage.
Then came what O’Rourke describes as her favourite race. At the 2009 World Championships in Berlin, she defied the odds again by making the final, then by finishing a close fourth, running 12.67 in lane one. A year later, she won her second European silver medal in Barcelona, this time denied by Nevin Yanit from Turkey, who was already arousing some suspicion with her bulking physique.
“I finished fourth in the world, in lane one, a year after being demolished in the Olympics. To come back like that, after being on my knees, it was so redeeming in my head. It was like a renaissance. Barcelona too.
“I got a second chance to be world class. And I had to work for every inch of it. I almost needed my career to hit rock bottom to get back to where I enjoyed it again.”
Still, her third Olympics, in London 2012, was only marginally more enjoyable than the previous two – this time just missing a place in the final.
“I left London at 5am in the morning, no one from the Irish management team ever contacted me. By the time the closing ceremony started, I was on a fishing boat off west Cork, licking my wounds. It felt like I’d had too many good days to let that be my last night. I really wanted to try win one more medal.”
Which took her to the European Indoors in Gothenburg, in March 2013, where she originally finished fourth. Yanit won another gold for Turkey – only one-hundredth of a second separating second and fourth. Three months later, Yanit’s positive doping test was announced. She was banned for three years, although got to keep her European gold from 2010.
“We knew Yanit wasn’t clean; there was always some natter about her. Then I also hurt my Achilles coming off the last hurdle, had surgery within six months. I remember getting an email from someone involved at the time, querying the cost. There was no ‘how are you feeling?’.
“It still took a long time, legally, before that bronze medal from Gothenburg came through. Dafne was just born – she’s 10 now. She was a tiny, tiny baby, I was changing her nappy, and the postman rang the doorbell with a package.
“By that point it meant almost nothing. It wasn’t even a designed medal. It was just a circular medal with European Athletics written on it. Eventually I put all my medals in a coffee table, but it seemed pointless to add that one. It looked like a fake medal.”
Still, she retired with five championship medals in all (including another European indoor bronze in 2009). O’Rourke believes the systems and structures she raged against have improved immeasurably, starting with the Sport Ireland Institute. She credits her own smooth transition into retirement to the two years she spent in player development with Munster Rugby, before setting out on her own.
“It did nag me for a few years, not winning an Olympic medal. Then I was like, ‘actually no’. I’d given it my all, it is what it is. The Olympics only come round once every four years, you don’t get a lot of chances.
“As a kid, I only ever wanted to qualify for the Olympics. That was the height of my ambition. Even when I went to college, I didn’t think I could win a medal in anything. Nobody did.
“It’s like I kept moving the goalposts. I went from wanting to get to the Olympics to wanting something bigger. That also meant the expectations were bigger. But I can look back now and think I’d a pretty savage career, and [I’m] very proud of the people I worked with.”
