ATLETICS:While David Gillick was the centre of the latest Irish medal homecoming at Dublin airport yesterday the man who helped reinvigorate his career in recent months was quietly plotting the next stage of his development as a world-class 400-metre runner.

Nick Dakin, who has been Britain's national events coach in the 400 metres hurdles since 2001 and sprints coach at Loughborough University, was back on the college campus yesterday afternoon, recalling some of his experiences with Gillick since last October, when the Dubliner nervously packed all his belongings into his car, took the ferry to England and effectively started all over again in an unfamiliar environment.

Dakin had been a little nervous himself when sitting in Birmingham's indoor arena on Saturday evening as Gillick toed the line to defend his European Indoor title. As it turned out, however, he wasn't too surprised at either Gillick's national record time of 45.52 seconds, nor the way he gunned down the imposing German, Bastian Swillims.

"I knew he was capable of it," said Dakin. "His 45.91 seconds from last month was definite proof of that. Unless that happened to be just an exceptional time you can usually find a little more with good competition like he had in Birmingham.

"Having said that, I was very pleased with his performance, and the way he executed them over the three races. He dealt with the final particularly well because the German athlete had looked good during the first two rounds. So I wasn't overly surprised, just happy at how well he is transferring training form to competition form."

It's now clear that Gillick's move to Loughborough was crucial to him getting his running career back on track. Since his gold medal success in 2005 things appeared to be going from bad to worse, despite some hints at progress, with the low point being his semi-final elimination at the European Championships in Gothenburg.

When he contacted Dakin about a possible move to Loughborough it suddenly seemed everything could fit back together again: "Well I know he had been looking at number of options in terms of where he might base himself at this stage of his career. I suppose he realised that Loughborough does have a good reputation for its athletics, but more importantly the very good training environment that we have here would allow him to elevate the consistency and quality of what he was doing before.

"I'd seen David run the English Indoor Championships back in 2005, when he made a bit of a breakthrough to win there. Obviously I was aware he had gone on to win in Madrid after that, and I met him again in Geneva last summer, when I had some athletes over there.

"So I was definitely aware he was a talented runner, who probably wasn't quite converting that to performances outdoors. Based on his indoor running, I don't think he was doing everything he was capable of outdoors."

Dakin's training group at Loughborough includes several world-class runners, including Britain's new 400 meters hope Martin Rooney (who skipped Birmingham) and also Jamaica's Kemel Thompson, the fifth-ranked 400 metre hurdler in the world. So Dakin knows what he's talking about when he says he believes Gillick can run under 45 seconds this summer - truly elevating him to world class status.

"David is a very strong runner. There are certainly some 400 metre runners out there who are quicker than him in terms of pure speed, like that brutal 200 metre speed and that. But he's got strengths in all areas, very good endurance capacity as well, so he's an out-and-out 400 metre runner really. Like I don't think we'll see him dropping down to 200 metres or moving up to 800 metres. I think he's smack bang where he wants to be event wise.

"So sub-45 seconds is not the ultimate goal. Definitely not. More his goal for the year. And I'd like to think he will do it. As long as he gets his head back into some hard training now, as we're still only starting into his campaign. It is true that not everyone runs massively quicker outdoors than they do indoors, but there is usually a little bit there, in terms of the work we haven't done yet.

"He is running more off strength rather than speed at this time, so the aim for this year would be to go sub 45 seconds, yes. That would put him up there with some of the best, up with the top dozen or so in the world."

Only 19 runners in the world broke 45 seconds last year, led by America's Olympic champion Jeremy Wariner's 43.62 (the only sub-44 clocking) - and only two of those were European, the Frenchman Leslie Djhone (44.91) and Marc Raquil (44.95).

At age 23, and only a few months into his new training regime, Gillick can definitely come close to that 45-second barrier in 2007, and if not then certainly going into Beijing in 2008. His outdoor best from last year had been 45.67, which he easily bettered in Birmingham, and his month-long training spell in Los Angeles from March 26th should go some ways towards bringing him to his prime come the summer.

"That's one of our regular training trips," added Dakin. "It's not massively intense, it's still more speed endurance."

So that's 45.52 seconds the first weekend in March, the first block of warm-weather training to come, and only then will he start his real speed work.

There really is no reason to put limits on what Gillick will run outdoors this summer - provided, of course, he remains injury free.