Great tracks of the world - Santry, Bislett, Zurich, Weston

ATHLETICS:Celebrationsa of Santry's glory nights recall one's own heroics when boys were boys and Western Park was the venue for an incredible sequence of world records

IT'S 40 years ago today since the birth of my neighbour, and stuck for a suitable present, I had to rush out last night to the Cathedral of Consumerism, also known as the Dundrum Town Centre. I had vowed never to set foot inside the place, but desperation finally got the better of me.

For old times' sake I left the car up on nearby Weston Park, and on the short walk down to the Cathedral, could not help hearing those words of Joni Mitchell - "They paved paradise, they put up a parking lot."

Around this time every year we transformed Weston Park into a running track. There was that neat, 100-metre stretch that ran from the Somerses' house down to the Reidys'. The 200-metre start was outside Billy Byrne's and the finish was down at the Floods'. And if we carried on into Weston Grove and through the laneway and back out again we had the perfect 400-metre circuit.

Those long straights and tight bends could have passed for Oslo's Bislett Stadium - at least they did for our purposes. We were 12 or 13 and we would line up as Steve Cram, Sebastian Coe and Eamonn Coghlan. We broke world records with incredible ease, sometimes twice in the same evening.

Occasionally, we were joined by John Treacy (the real one), who would spend the odd couple of nights in our house.

That running track witnessed some of the other great talents of Irish athletics, though much less heralded: Mark Kelly, Trevor Bailey, Michael Hoey.

When we were finally called in we headed for the kitchen sink with the warm sweat still on our backs and splashed cold water over our faces. What a night, what a meeting! For sure, Weston Park was the fastest track in the world.

It was 50 years ago last Wednesday that Santry Stadium first staked a similar claim. On the evening of July 9th, 1958, Albert Thomas - better known as "Albie" - landed in Dublin as part of a group of Australian athletes travelling around Europe ahead of the Commonwealth Games in Cardiff. Thomas had been lured to Dublin by Ireland's first and last great athletics promoter, Billy Morton, who had just completed a year-long campaign to build a new cinder track on a site he had acquired in Santry.

Morton's ingenious ideas to fund the building of the track are legendary, and included the ceremonial donation of a shovel (and some cash) by Bernard McDonagh of Parkersburg, West Virginia. McDonagh was a self-made millionaire and proprietor of the O. Ames Company, which had been making shovels since 1774, two years before the Declaration of Independence.

How McDonagh ended up part-financing Santry is a long story; let's just say Ronnie Delany had something to do with it.

With his track built, Morton was intent on getting the best runners to use it, and here's where his genius really kicked in. He went to London to meet up with the group of Australians, which included Herb Elliott and Merv Lincoln - two of the fastest milers in the world.

"We have these lush, green trees all around the track," Morton told them, "and what they do is they suck in the oxygen all day long, and then in the evening, they release it all again. There is more oxygen around the track in Santry than anywhere else in the world. That's what makes it so fast. That, and the cinders, of course."

To this day no one seems sure whether the Australians actually believed him. Whatever, Thomas came to town and on that evening of July 9th won the three miles in 13:10.8 - knocking four seconds off the world record.

"That was the fastest track in the world," Thomas told us in Santry just last Wednesday, having returned exactly 50 years later to the site of his world record. Thomas is now 73 and wears a pacemaker, which did not stop him running a lap of the track. The cinders are long gone and most of the trees too, but Thomas was still raving about the place, 50 years on.

He'd raved about it to Elliott and Lincoln back in 1958, and so the entire group of Australians came to Santry the following month and ran the greatest mile race of all time - or at least the greatest mile world record of all time. There's another event to celebrate that occasion coming up in a couple of weeks' time (visit www.mortonmemorial.com).

By the end of the summer, the Santry track had helped create world records over the one-, two- and three-mile distances. Yet such glorious days were never to be repeated. For the summer of 1958 it was undoubtedly the fastest track in the world, but a question remains: is it the fastest track in Ireland?

I consulted a few people on this and discovered my elder brother Donal had a fondness for the old grass track at Trinity College, which we knew simply as College Park. It still is a gorgeous setting, even if the track has the slightly unusual feature of a small straight on the bends. Trinity may not have been the fastest track in Ireland, but it was definitely the most beautiful.

"I ran some of my greatest races there," says Donal, "and one of my proudest victories was at the Trinity Relays - in 1992, I think it was. I went neck-and-neck with Eoin Burke Kennedy in the 600 metres, and people were shouting their heads off . . . 'We're giving that to you, O'Riordan,' they said. It was a classic Chariots of Fire moment."

I also discovered my dad, Tom, had a fondness for the old grass track at the Mardyke in Cork - where 40 years ago he became the first Irishman to run 5,000 metres in under 14 minutes, winning at the annual Cork City Sports in 13:54.6. He's not sure if it was four or five laps to the mile, but is sure it was very windy and he led every step of the way.

The Mardyke has long since been resurfaced in soft "tartan" and, on the strength of the Irish all-comers list, could claim to be the fastest track in Ireland. Four of the most impressive all-comers records were set there: Johnny Gray's 1:45.56 for 800 metres, Noureddine Morceli's 3:34.78 for 1,500 metres, Sydney Maree's 3:49.44 for the mile, and Luke Kipkosgei's 13:15.00 for 5,000 metres. Yet no one expects those times to be matched at today's Cork City Sports.

My old favourite is still Belfield, now badly worn but also a world-record track. It's just hard to believe it's 23 years since John O'Shea of GOAL had the idea of staging a world four-mile relay attempt with his dream team of Coghlan, Ray Flynn, Marcus O'Sullivan and Frank O'Mara.

Coghlan was badly out of shape but still did his bit, and anchored by Flynn, the team clocked a world record 15:49.08. The record still stands, and one of the few pictures Flynn has on the wall of his athletics agency office in Tennessee is of that team.

There are some beautiful new running tracks all over Ireland now, one of the newest being at the Charlesland site in Greystones, Co Wicklow. It has a wonderfully bowl-shaped and oxygenated setting Morton would have envied, but of course it will almost certainly never witness a world record.

Thinking about it, I ran my fastest times in Santry, but I never broke a world record there. The problem was that not even Santry was a match for our old track on Weston Park, which had the absolute requirement for a fast track: it was a little short of regulation distance.