Attitude to Worlds leaves a lot to be desired

ATHLETICS: Lots has changed since John Treacy retained his world cross country title in Limerick 30 years ago, but perhaps it's our whole attitude towards the event that's as much to blame for our decline, writes IAN O'RIORDAN

HUNTER S THOMPSON would wilfully lift from other writers, but reckoned the day you start stealing from your own work, you’re in big trouble. I know exactly what he was talking about.

All week I’d been wondering how to tackle the World Cross Country. Today, somewhere on the verge of the Arabian Desert, the latest edition of this classic race takes place – more or less 30 years to the day since John Treacy won it in a blaze of glory at the old Greenpark racecourse in Limerick.

Indeed, what a great day that was for Irish sport, and on special anniversaries like this, dutifully parroted by us sportswriters. So I was going to call John and ask if he wanted to relive it again, only to realise I did exactly that 10 years ago – on the 20th anniversary.

You can find it on the irishtimes.com archive, under the headline “Treacy brings it all back home”. It’s a beautifully written piece, naturally, recapturing that wonderful atmosphere in Limerick – the crowd of 25,000 spilling around in the pouring rain as Treacy glides over the mud with effortless grace to defend the title he’d won in Glasgow the previous year.

Ah yes, steal a more few lines from that, brush it up a little, and we’d have another fine piece for the archives. Plus finish up before the five o’clock whistle. But more mushy stuff? If this is what Bob Dylan calls the “mainlining of nostalgia” then I had to come clean.

So I thought about another angle, which they may have headlined “The decline and fall of Irish Cross Country”. Ireland has only two representatives in today’s event, which takes place in Amman, Jordan – Mark Kenneally in the senior men’s race, and Linda Byrne in the senior women. And they’ll do well to finish in the top 100.

No disrespect to these two, but that’s a fairly pathetic show from the country which 30 years ago won the men’s title, finished second in the team race, and also produced the fourth best junior men’s team and seventh best senior women’s. Truth is Ireland has hardly figured on the men’s side since Treacy’s success in 1979, and without Catherina McKiernan and Sonia O’Sullivan, wouldn’t have figured on the women’s side either.

But it’s wrong to compare the 2009 World Cross Country with 1979. For a start, there were no Kenyans or Ethiopians back then (they only signed up in 1981). Unless some of them run the wrong way, Kenya and Ethiopia will fill all of today’s leading places, closely followed by Eritrea (who only signed up in 2000) and then Qatar – who are essentially another Kenyan team in disguise.

Or consider this: Britain is the only European country to send full teams to Amman, and the only hope there is that they all make it back alive. In Limerick, 17 of the 21 teams that finished the senior men’s race were European – the others being the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

In other words, the World Cross Country has changed irrevocably since 1979. If it was a tough race back then, it’s bloody murderous now. That’s not saying Treacy wouldn’t have been mixing it with the best of them today. He was a freak talent with an enormous capacity for fast, hard running over long distances. He proved that not only in Glasgow and Limerick but also the Olympic marathon in Los Angeles five years later, where he beat all the Kenyans and Ethiopians.

But what has also changed, I fear, is our whole attitude towards the World Cross Country, and that’s as much to blame for our decline and fall as the emergence of the Kenyans and Ethiopians. At least that’s the impression I got after calling down to my dad last night to get his view on the thing.

Apparently he’d written a piece questioning our attitude towards the World Cross Country, way back in 1977. The next day he got a call from Bill Coghlan asking that he meet with him, urgently, at Bewley’s on Westmoreland Street. Coghlan, father of Eamonn and then president of the governing body BLE, was tired of hearing about what Ireland should or shouldn’t be doing to succeed in the World Cross Country. So he asked my dad, who’d run the thing about 10 times, to join forces with Lar Byrne, the highly respected coach from Clonliffe Harriers. They’d be the team coaches for Limerick, with Brendan Foreman, the former BLE secretary, the team manager.

Byrne – or Laro, as he was affectionately known – was one of the true scholars and gentlemen of the sport. He once ran the famous London to Brighton road race, and was at the Iffley Road track in Oxford in May 1954 when Roger Bannister made history with his 3:59.4-minute mile.

In 1976, Laro coached the Clonliffe cross country team of Gerry Finnegan, Jerry Kiernan, Frank Murphy and Padraig Keane to their first national title. He practised what he preached from the heart – and that was no-nonsense, quality running, with a fearless spirit to succeed.

One of the first things they did was write a letter to every half-decent cross country runner in Ireland, imploring them to make the extra effort towards Limerick. Then they organised training squads, which drew a massive response, and when Cement Roadstone came on board as team sponsors, Operation ’79 (as I’ve just named it) took on further momentum.

Laro arranged a team base at the Ashling Hotel next to the Phoenix Park, and from November, squad sessions were staged every second weekend. Most of the sessions were built around “fartlek”, a favourite of my dad’s, which translates from the old Swedish system of “speed play” – or running as fast as you feel.

The big test run would be the 1978 World Cross Country in Glasgow, and although Treacy won the individual title, aged just 20, there was some disappointment the team only managed sixth – just 30 points away from a medal.

So efforts were doubled for Limerick, and when Treacy agreed to spend a couple of weeks over Christmas in Dublin, the spirit of the sessions soared. The two coaches, meanwhile, left no stone unturned, travelling to Limerick in advance on several occasions, checking out the course, and, confident of the need for post-race celebrations, sampling the Guinness at the team hotel.

As a result of all this, competition for places was intense. Neil Cusack, winner of the 1974 Boston Marathon, was one of the big names not to make it. But BLE had the final say on selection – and went for Treacy, Danny McDaid, Gerry Deegan, Mick O’Shea, Donie Walsh, Tony Brien, Eamonn Coghlan, Ray Treacy and Eddie Leddy.

Anyway, all the hard work paid off, as that team won the silver medals, behind England, and ahead of Russia – the last time that European nations took all three medals. The last time, too, I suspect, that Ireland’s level of preparation was what the World Cross Country demands.

Yet Laro continued to be a positive influence on Irish athletics for years after. He was team manager in Los Angeles when Treacy won his Olympic silver. I don’t know how Laro would have felt about the World Cross Country, 30 years on from Limerick, but I know his attitude towards the event and the sport is greatly missed. He died on February 3rd, aged 80, and if that’s getting all nostalgic about the thing again then sometimes it can’t be helped.