Laments at the ready for last Rose of Cobh

TV View:   It must have been lonely on that stage at 8.0 last night. And never is that isolation felt more than when you're alone in a vast crowd. Surrounded by all that colour and bustle and noise and hullabaloo, the spotlight beaming down, the flashes from the cameras blinding your eyes, but your thoughts still fixed on giving your all.

But around you are a group of finely tuned, fiercely, ferociously ambitious women, in the prime of their lives, fitter than they'll ever be, who would saw off their grannies' left elbows with a blunt knife if it meant getting their hands on the big prize and relegating you to a mere PS on the night's script. This challenge would demand digging deeper than, perhaps, ever before.

That, then, was what Ryan Tubridy went through as he took to the stage at the Festival Dome in Tralee last night, at roughly the same time Sonia O'Sullivan set off in Athens.

If you asked any one today "how did Ryan cope?" we hope they'd say: "couldn't tell you, I was busy watching the, well, Rose of Cobh bow out from the Olympics, with more grace and dignity than any being should be able to muster on a night like that".

Ryan probably did fine, but Sonia, even in defeat, did better.

"In Cobh they build 'em to last," Bill O'Herlihy had put it at the start of the evening's proceedings, but you sensed it wasn't going to be a medal-winning adieu when they spoke of her greatness only in the past tense. The odd "you just never know with Sonia" was thrown in here and there to keep hope alive, but it wasn't to be.

They showed a montage of her finest moments, the earliest from 1987. Her ambitions then? "I'd like to run in the Olympics and, I dunno, I'll take every day as it comes," said the 16-year-old.

Tribute time. "She has been a magnificent athlete for Ireland and she owes us nothing," said John Treacy, while Minister for Sport John O'Donoghue paid homage to our "Sown-ya".

Jerry Kiernan, though, was fearing the worst, as was Eamonn Coughlan. "There's a part of me thinking 'why is Sonia there?'," said Kiernan. He thought roughly the same about James Nolan, said as much, and all hell broke loose via satellite, Bill backing him up by pointing out that Ronnie Delaney had run faster back in 1956. Ouuuuch! No bad blood last night, though.

Race time. We were told she needed a slow pace. "The walkers were faster over the first 400 metres this morning," noted Tony O'Donoghue. Good. Sonia in the lead. But then the Chinese set off, and that was that.

"Like a stone dropping through water," said Kiernan of her race. "Sonia had the mind but not the body, (Paula) Radcliffe had the body but not the mind," said Coughlan. But Sonia Radcliffes are hard to find.

If Brendan Foster, over on the BBC, was choked when the marvellous Kelly Holmes won gold earlier in the evening he was gone again when Sonia completed that final lap. "Her lap of honour," as he described it, "Ireland's greatest ever athlete."

Back on RTÉ, O'Herlihy attempted to rally his downcast troops, tried to turn the night in to a celebration of her career rather than a wake, but, a bit like ourselves, Kiernan and Coughlan weren't ready to party just yet.

"I thought something special would happen out there tonight, but it just wasn't there," she said to Ryle Nugent, "I don't know, I think I've had it, that's about it." Why did she keep running? "If it wasn't the Olympics I probably wouldn't have finished the race, but it's the Olympic Games, the flame was burning, I just couldn't leave the track before the finishing line." Back in the studio the panel reminisced. "This is beginning to sound like an obituary," said Bill. Enough.

Meanwhile, over on RTÉ 1 the English Rose was reelin' and jiggin' around the stage and the crowd was whoopin' and cheerin' and Ryan was clappin' and laughin' and . . . life, in the Festival Dome, was just going on, like it was just another night.

Olympic life, mind, won't ever feel quite the same without Sonia.