ATHLETICS:Bowing out at the 20- mile mark in the 1960 Olympic marathon, after leading early on, was just a passing disappointment in an otherwise glorious athletics career, writes IAN O'RIORDAN

SOMEWHERE BETWEEN the moment he sat down on the cobbled streets and found himself being whisked back to the Colosseum in an ambulance Bertie Messitt heard a voice in his head: ‘This is not the most important thing in your life’.

He didn’t know who it was, where it was coming from, but it freaked him. This WAS the most important thing in his life, and he’d just blown it, would have to live with it until the end of his days. It was 1960, in Rome, and Bertie Messitt, 31 years old and at his athletic peak, had been leading the Olympic marathon through 12 miles.

Then, the quickening pace coupled with crippling heat, he began to struggle, until at 20 miles, right where the marathon turns into a wall, he was gone, struck down by the strength of his own will. It was his one and only Olympic experience, and not one to be proud of, or so he thought.

When they packed out St Anne’s Church in Shankill on Tuesday to pay their last respects to Bertie Messitt nothing about Rome in 1960 was important, just as the voice in his head had once predicted. They were there to honour and celebrate one of the great distance runners of their era, who died last Saturday, aged 83, and in the end they couldn’t help but break into a spontaneous standing ovation.

Afterwards they stood around St Anne’s in small clusters, the fellow Olympians inevitably drawn to each other: Ronnie Delany and Frank Murphy; the Hooper brothers, Dick and Pat; Jim Hogan and Tom O’Riordan; Derek McCleane; Willie Dunne and Jim McNamara, two of his old colleagues from Donore Harriers, with an Olympic marathon tale of their own.

Bertie Messitt was a true aristocrat of the amateur spirit, and ran for club and country with unwavering pride and dedication, his experience of the 1960 Olympics perhaps a timely reminder that no athlete should become too consumed by the old five-ringed circus. With just 150 days before London – from next Tuesday, to be exact – it’s easy to lose sight of that.

Sonia O’Sullivan always said the calendar flips over with a bigger and more ominous thud in Olympic year, that the obsessive sense of anticipation is not always a good thing. It’s perfectly understandable why most athletes have set London as their big target for 2012, but the danger with that is missing out on the smaller targets, which can prove equally important in the end. Few athletes ultimately realised that better than Bertie Messitt.

Born under the shadow of the Little Sugar Loaf, the area known as Boghall – a couple of miles from Bray – he know nothing of athletics until at age 18 he joined the Royal Irish Fusiliers, better known as the “Faughs”.

There, his potential talent based purely on his skinny frame, he applied himself to the disciplines of distance running, and after being stationed in Palestine, Egypt, Jordan, Gibraltar, and Germany with the British army – emerged in 1952 with ambitions to make it on the world stage. Times were tough, reality bit hard, his running ambitions soon replaced by the building sites of Manchester.

Lured back home and finally landing himself a job as a bus conductor with the old CIE, by 1958 he was arguably the best distance runner in Ireland – complete with the brilliant nickname the “Lightning Conductor”, and recipient of the inaugural Texaco athletics award.

Thus the Rome Olympics became the inevitable goal – and after winning the Irish marathon title in a national record of 2:28.40 (his Donore team mate Willie Dunne was second in 2:29:50) he immediately booked his two-weeks annual leave from CIE. Typically, his selection hit some obstacles, and only after securing extra funding did the Olympic Council of Ireland agree to send him, provided he returned his Irish tracksuit afterwards, and didn’t mind flying out a few days before the marathon.

So on August 25th, 1960, Bertie Messitt watched the opening ceremony through the window of a TV rental shop in Bray, before completing his Olympic preparations between shifts at CIE.

When he got to Rome the summer heat was still stifling: the marathon, by way of consolation, didn’t start until 5pm. When he joined Dunne at the start area they noticed a particularly skinny-looking African limbering up, in his bare feet.

“Look at your man,” said Dunne. “Has he any idea how far this race is?” With that Messitt went looking for Billy Morton, one of the Irish officials, to see could they find a spare pair of runners for their fellow competitor.

What they or few others in Rome realised was his name was Abebe Bikila, from Ethiopia, and later that evening arrived back at the Arch of Constantine, beside the Colosseum, still barefooted, as Africa’s first Olympic champion, in a world record 2:15:16.

There was little consolation for Messitt: Olympic history books still tell the tale of the Italian announcers declaring, at 12 miles, that “Alberto Messitt” was leading, and the crowds, assuming him to be one of their own, went crazy; and his anguish was made worse when he arrived back at the Colosseum to find his precious Irish tracksuit had been stolen.

It took him a while to recover, although in 1961 he won his fourth Irish cross country title, and in 1962 ran his second European Championships, in Belgrade, carrying the Irish flag in the opening ceremony, and finishing 13th in the marathon. By the time he formally retired from competitive running in 1966 he’d set 16 Irish records and won 45 national senior medals, including 15 team medals with Donore.

Not that his impact on Irish distance running ended there: he helped establish Donnybrook Athletic Club and later the Business Houses Athletics Association, who still organise the Dublin Marathon.

What set Bertie Messitt apart as a distance runner was his fearlessness in competition. He would have been first in line for tomorrow’s National cross country in Santry, whereas many of our current athletes seem to think they’ll be better served by staying away.

It’s a pity, because London, like any good road trip, is more about the journey, not the destination, and as Bertie Messitt proved, it’s not the most important thing in life.