Boy To Man (Part 1)

A Saturday night in Pleasantville USA

It's getting dusky in Dedham, a snoozing little dormitory town outside of Boston. You've seen a million movies set in gentle places like this. Saturday night is quiet here. The quirky little Museum of Bad Art is closed, a flock of teenagers are getting fat and giddy outside the ice cream parlour, and a little three-piece band are setting up in The Cookhouse. Stick around and you'll hear Forever in Blue Jeans. Murdered.

A mile out the road and a few hundred skinny people and thousands of fat mosquitoes are gathered at the Solomon Track and Field facility for a twilight meet.

Three tricolours hang over in that corner where they start the 200 metres races, but this ain't the Olympics, this isn't the standon-your-hind-legs-and-cheer-for-the-little-country business that gives you your jollies every four years. This is nuts and bolts. You hear the thumpety thump of runners' feet as they pass, you pick up the hisses from the pack urging the pacemaker to shift it, shift it. People here know how the inner engine of athletics functions. What's a good split? Who's a good rabbit? What's a fast time for early June? Who's on course to lower their PB?

The athletes chat loudly as they stretch languidly around the perimeter of the greentopped track as the sun bows out. Their audience - coaches, injured athletes and recently retired athletes - lean on the fences or sit in the little stack of bleachers near the finish line. The air hums with track gossip.

By the time the main event begins the sky is inky. People talk softly to each other, fingers point in the gloom. The guy to watch is number one-four-six. Carroll. Mark Carroll. Irish guy. Used to be a European junior champion, got a bronze medal in Budapest. Just getting better and better. Ran 7:30 for the 3,000 last year.

Mark Carroll does his business with routine briskness. His brows are furrowed over his swimming pool blue eyes as he pumps out the laps. Over 5,000 metres the race never gets beyond his control. He'd set himself a target. Run 13:20 in Dedham. He runs 13.21 and finds a little burst down the home straight to kill off the challenge of the sticky Australian, Sean Creighton. Not bad, not bad, he says afterwards. He hasn't been to the track yet this season. He's running 13.21 off base work. Tonight he's wrapped up Olympic qualification. The summer is young. He's feeling good.

A lost weekend in Cork

He was in Blackrock Clinic knowing what was about to be said, but not believing that it would be said. Finally, the charts and clipboards were set aside and the sentence floated out like a dark squall over a beach. "You won't be going to the Olympics." He was 24. It was summer in Dublin. Outside people were going about their business. Carroll hurried towards Cork and home. All he will say about what happened next is that he got acquainted with a few places in Cork that he hadn't really known before. Lost weekend. That kind of stuff. That purging took a few days. Then he spoke to Br John Dooley, who knows that athletes move forward like mules after carrots. Br Dooley told him that his cycle as a runner in his prime was the next four years. Sydney was when Carroll should expect to be arriving at the summit. Carroll seized the words and built his rehabilitation on them.

Two white guys, only one with an unimpeachable drugs record, have been under the 13 minute barrier. Gebrselassie and Komen have been under 12.40. That's like coming home from the moon and finding out that people have been picnicing on Mars.

His talent and his obsessive need to consummate it had nearly devoured him. He liked to run at race pace as often as he could. He had hyper-mobility in his ankles, which meant that he went over on them often and when he did his shins took the strain. For years he could never get to be as good as he knew he could be.

His love of the sport started in the North Mon with inter-class cross country competitions. In his last year at the school, the track squad flew to America with Br Dooley, a bunch of spotty schoolkids from Cork running in the Penn Relays in front of 40,000 people.

By then Carroll had an image stuck in his head, a great sporting moments clip which he'd seen on RTE one Christmas at home. The soundtrack was One Moment in Time and the pictures were a collage of great Irish sporting moments. Shuffled in there was John Treacy winning in the mud and the rain in Limerick.

Treacy, over all the others, seemed to epitomise something about Irish sport. Treacy was a Providence College man. His brother Ray was the Providence College coach. The decision was what the Americans call a no-brainer. Carroll would be a PC guy.

He loved America. He met Amy Rudolph in first year and by the end of the second semester, well Mark and Amy were k-i-s-s-i-n-g and it's been like that for eight happy years, running parallel careers and supporting each other in bad times. He's had his dose of them. He's always had bad luck with his body. He remembers in school dying to take on a mouthy runner from Tipp by the name of PJ O'Rourke. Carroll knowing in his own cocky heart that he could beat him. Injury deprived him there. Even last summer, for the World Championships in Seville, he found himself running on empty. Literally. He was diagnosed as anemic, and his iron content had somehow evaporated. He got through the semi-final race in Seville and just hoped he could find a way to go out and survive the final.

He has learnt. Two weeks ago he felt a slight twinge in his right leg. He took two days' rest. Before he would have run through it, defying and denying the pain. In 1996, when Atlanta was taken from him, he went back to Providence and watched his Olympics go by on the television, watched his long-standing girlfriend Rudolph compete for the States. He didn't flinch. He just lay back and thought of Sydney.