TO MEET with triumph and disaster and treat those two impostors just the same.
The only reason to complain about what befell Sonia O'Sullivan the other day is the time it happened, not the detail of it, nor even why. Sonia remains today what she was before the 5,000 metres final, a source of enormous pride to us all.
Why? Why does she have such an impact on us? Why were the hopes of the nation so raised at the prospect of her gold, and why were most of us - though not me - so abjectly disappointed at her failure?
What quality has she which is so distinct, so powerful, so captivating that her failure is taken personally by so many of us?
What she has is everything. We like her because she is so ordinary, yet in her ordinariness she has style and grace and an odd, unpredictable beauty.
In detail she is not good looking, and no doubt she spent many teenager hours examining herself in the mirror saying: "My nose is awful and my eyes are tiny and my teeth are massive and my cheekbones are so bony."
But she is beautiful; it is an odd, gazelle beauty, gaunt and not extravagantly feminine; but it is real beauty, a beauty that accompanies her style and grace perfectly. It is not salon beauty, but it is the beauty of an athlete, the beauty of the plains.
Regal and Proud
It is regal and it is proud. That line of chin, those lips, that strong nose, that imperious look; it is a face which conveys natural authority. It is the sort of face which people will note in a room, and nudge one another in admiration. It is handsome and confident and yet likeable.
More than that. People who meet Sonia O'Sullivan - I am sure - want her to like them. Her taste and judgment are to be taken seriously. Like me, strangers silently urge her, like me.
Distance running does not always make a woman sexually engaging. The secondary characteristics of breast and buttocks that most men like are often sacrificed in a regimen of running a score of miles a day.
Yet Sonia O'Sullivan radiates sexuality. She has not been neutered by her calling. Quite the reverse. When she breaks into that long stride, her imperious nose like the prow of a Viking ship, she has a strength and a balletic grace which are pure sex.
She is one of nature's aristocrats, and as such, she invites and secures admiration and deference whatever she does, in singlet and shorts or in ballgown.
But because she is so ordinary, we like her as well as admire her. She is human. She is not some lofty toffee nose, but a plain person with some not very plain person's qualities of courage and dedication and a sublime and elegant athleticism.
She is like a cheetah when she runs, a thing of beauty, defined by muscle and sinew, rhythm and grace.
In life, things go wrong: somebody's triumph is somebody else's disaster. We do not live in a world which is neutral in consequence.
Sonia the magnificent failed the other day, as Wang succeeded. What matter? She has given us enormous pleasure and pride in what she has done before, simply because she did it in style.
Pure Unmitigated Class
She was not the running equivalent of Jack Charlton's football team clumsy, style less but effective. She is everything we want Irishness to mean, that is to say, she is pure unmitigated class. Her running is not a lolloping bog trotting, but athletic grace personified.
So let us not repine at her failure, but rejoice simply in the fact that she is what she is, one of the most beautiful of all of God's creations.
When she comes home, let us meet with triumph and disaster:
and treat those two impostors Just the same; and see in future if we can't get those impostors to make their appearance at a reasonable hour, rather than half past thingummy, when the milkman is clinking about his rounds and the beer is beginning to addle the judgment a little.
I spent fully an hour watching the men's hammer under the impression that it was the women's 4 x 100 butterfly relay, and then I had a glorious time urging on Francis Barrett in the beach volleyball, only to discover some time around dawn that I was actually watching Urdu for beginners.
And my somewhat belated victory dance around my front garden the other morning at Ronnie Delany's gold medal was not appreciated by my neighbours - I have several boots to prove it, though alas, no pairs. I might just do a dawn victory hokeycokey to celebrate Michael Carruth's gold in the synchronised swimming to get the partners to the footwear I have already acquired.
I might even, if I feel happy enough, book the Sean Norman Ceili band for my dawn boogey around the old ancestral acres. I came across Sean and his fellow musicians at a wedding recently and, simply, they made the entire evening.
They gave us the Siege of Limerick and the Walls of Ennis - or is it the Siege of Ennis and the Walls of Limerick? - and rigs and jeels through the night.
It was music at its most transforming. Inhibitions were abolished with the first note of the accordeon. The old, the young, the thin, the fat, the stately and the lissom were lured out to step the light fantastic through the night, and everybody loved it, absolutely loved the evening.
Mildly Dispiriting
What was mildly dispiriting was that so many people thought it was highly innovative to have a ceili band at a wedding party. Why? What has bone wrong with us that it should be regarded as unusual to have a ceili band at a social function? Surely it should be the most natural thing in the land to have Irish music at an Irish gathering?
Music such as Sean Norman's is joyous and fun, eradicates differences between sex, age and station, and gives people an old fashioned sense of enjoyment which no rock music can ever manage.
More than that, it makes you sweat like Sonia O'Sullivan. And more even than that, the gaiety of dance makes you happy and carefree as nothing else in life can.
I don't off hand have Sean Norman's number, but you can get him - or any other traditional band - through Comhaltas Ceoltoiri Eireann (God bless it) at 01 2800295. It is one of the shames of the world that we have this treasury of music and musicians, to give pleasure to all, yet do not enjoy them at every opportunity.