Barcelona is just eight weeks down the road

ATHLETICS:The 15 Irish athletes who are relying on qualifying marks set almost a year ago would want to get their spikes on pretty quick, writes IAN O'RIORDAN

YOU KNOW summertime is in bloom when Con Houlihan starts writing about days in the bog. The soft turf. The heavy sleán. The sharp pike. The sods spread out parallel to the bank. The wild mountain thyme. You know it.

“In May and June activity was at its height,” recalled Con in our evening newspaper this week. “In the hills all around you could see smoke rising from more fires than you could count . . . And we hadn’t much need of the weather forecast. When the boglark disappeared away up into the sky you could be sure of a fine day.”

I was up in our bog in the Dublin Featherbeds on Thursday morning and couldn’t believe how dry the turf was. We’ve got a load cut already and I swear some of it is nearly ready to bring home. Strictly speaking, it still needs to be footed – as in the back-breaking process of carefully assembling five or six sods into the shape of a small stool, for drying purposes, which invariably fall over on the first attempt. But another week or two of weather like this and that turf is ready for burning.

Summertime is not coming. Summertime is here. Three more weeks and the days start getting shorter. Five more weeks and Bob Dylan plays Thomond Park. Eight more weeks and we’re in Barcelona for the European Athletics Championships.

By then summertime will nearly be over – yet the only thing that seems slow in blooming right now is our athletes. We might even have the turf saved before any of them have a proper race.

The European Championships is the event this summer. At least from an Irish interest. Any of our athletes serious about making an impression at the London Olympics in two years would want to be in Barcelona, preferably contesting a final.

By my calculations, 23 Irish athletes have already qualified – which would be encouraging if it weren’t for the fact only eight of those have qualified with standards recorded this year.

Being honest, we’ll probably have only three medal contenders in Barcelona: David Gillick in the 400 metres, Derval O’Rourke in 100 metres hurdles and Olive Loughnane in the 20km walk – yet none of those three have recorded any times in their events this summer.

Going on the qualifying criteria laid down by Athletics Ireland, standards for Barcelona can be achieved between January 1st of 2009 and July 18th – which means just seven weeks remain. The European Championships begin on July 27th and finish on August 1st and there’s really no time to lose. Those 15 athletes who are relying on qualifying marks set almost a year ago would want to get their spikes on pretty quick.

The good news is Gillick, O’Rourke and Loughnane appear ready to bloom. Loughnane, in fact, competes in the Krakow Race Walking Challenge in Poland later today, over the shorter 10km distance.

Last year’s World Championship silver medallist is understandably keen to complete this one, having failed to finish her two races over 20km this year; on April 11th she fell at the 12km mark in the Rio Major event in Portugal, and earlier this month, on May 1st, was disqualified for three fouls in San Giovanni in Italy.

“Obviously I’d prefer to have finished a race at this stage,” she told me. “But I actually hadn’t finished a race this time last year either. Generally, training has been going well. But I would like things to start coming together for me soon.”

Loughnane has a tendency to blossom at the right time, as her brilliant performance in Berlin last August proved – and she skipped the lucrative World Cup Race Walk in Chihuahua, Mexico, this month to focus all preparations on Barcelona.

At 34, her greatest strength is perhaps her experience, so much so she’s essentially coaching herself, despite linking up last year with the Norwegian Stefane Platzer, who coached his wife, Kjersti, to Olympic silver medals in Athens and Beijing.

“Our training philosophies were just a little bit different,” Loughnane explained. “He was coming from a very-high-mileage background. I didn’t feel that was going to work for me. He still advises me about a few things. We chat away and I bounce ideas off him. But I’m not going on camps with him any more.

“I’m just doing my own thing. I suppose you get quite set in your ways. But sure, Barcelona is looming on the horizon now. It’s certainly early compared to the World Championships or Olympics. I may even have a holiday this year. You know – a real holiday, in August.”

(So might I, actually.)

By the way, Robert Heffernan, who has qualified for the European Championships in the 20km and 50km walk, also competes in Krakow, and, given his competitive spirit, has to be considered an outside hope for a medal in Barcelona.

I got an email from Derval O’Rourke this week and she also sounded like an athlete ready to bloom. The hamstring injury which cruelly cut short her indoor season was, naturally, slow to heal, and she’s only gradually returning to full hurdles training.

She ran the 200 metres in Loughborough University last weekend – her first in nine years – and clocked a respectable 23.71, and she’ll probably run a few more 100 metres flat before returning to the hurdles.

“The usual Derval in May, basically,” she told me. “I may start to hurdle in Geneva on June 12th because I’m there as part of the women’s 4x100-metre team. Terrie Cahill has taken over as coach of the team, which is great. We are going to give it a bit of a lash for Barcelona. The team actually has a fairly realistic chance of London if there is some good structure put in place.”

O’Rourke won’t need reminding she was first European – and fourth overall – at the World Championships last summer, and if she gets it right in Barcelona there’s no reason she can’t match or else beat the silver medal she won in Gothenburg four years ago.

Gillick was Europe’s best 400-metre runner last summer and he’ll have his first outdoor race at the distance next Sunday, June 6th, in Rabat, Morocco, followed by the Diamond League meeting in Rome four days later.

“I’m ready to be unleashed!” he says on his Twitter site, and by the sounds of things he sure is.

Paul Hession, who can still mix it with the best 200-metre runners in Europe, runs the 100 metres in Hengelo tomorrow, and Joanne Cuddihy has shown good form over 400 metres in Australia.

Of the 23 Irish athletes so far qualified for Barcelona, only hammer thrower Eileen O’Keeffe definitely won’t be there as a knee injury has ended her summer season.

But the hope is Athletics Ireland will have learnt some lessons and only select athletes fully fit to compete, and the only criteria there should be proving fitness over the next seven weeks.

There’s no point sending athletes who have qualifying standards from last summer because history has told us enough times they won’t be up for it. It’s like going back to the same bank of turf you cut last year. It won’t all be there, and whatever sods are left wouldn’t be worth bringing anywhere.