Neglecting to succeed clearly the hallmark of an accomplished Irish Olympian

I was sitting in a gallery full of failures on Thursday night, listening to Sonia O’Sullivan talk about the most successful failure of her life. It started out grounded in negativity, but soon turned incredibly uplifting.

Anyone who still thinks failure is a dirty word should have been there. Or, anyone who has tried, failed, no matter, try again, fail again, fail better – to paraphrase Samuel Beckett.

Failure was definitely the theme of the night, but only in the context of success, or indeed the notion that many of the world's greatest success stories have arisen from the ashes of failure. That cool Science Gallery at Trinity College is staging an exhibition entitled Fail Better , and O'Sullivan was in town to talk about a significant item on display: her athlete accreditation pass from the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta.

To this day, outside of her Olympic silver medal at the 2000 Sydney Olympics, what most people remember about O’Sullivan is not her European Championship gold medal in 1994, or her World Championship gold medal in 1995, or her double-World Cross Country titles of 1998, but her failure in Atlanta when hot favourite to win the 5,000m only to drop out just under 2½ laps from home.

Contentious issue
Exactly what went wrong has been the subject of great debate, but what is certain is that O'Sullivan was not right, was not fit and was never going to win that race.

At the time, her father John tried to put that failure into context: “No one had died,” he said, although for his daughter that was little consolation. In fact Atlanta was the beginning of a year-long cycle of failure which climaxed at the 1997 World Championships in Athens when she failed to make the final. It felt like the end of the world.

Our host for the night, Ray D’Arcy, opened by asking the gallery how many of us had failed in our lives. Every single hand went up. Then he asked how many had learned from that failure. Some were not so sure. Then he turned to O’Sullivan, who was joined by Dr Ian Robertson, head of the psychology department at Trinity, and together they made perfect sense of the success of failure. The success doesn’t necessarily have to come later: it can work just as well the other way round, provided the lesson of it all is found somewhere in between.

For O’Sullivan it took a while. That accreditation pass from Atlanta had been secreted in a kitchen drawer of her London home for about 17 years, until she came across it last summer. She had long since disposed of every other item associated with Atlanta, but something compelled her to keep that pass.

It was part of the realisation that what happened in Atlanta is a part of her story and, ultimately, it made for a better life afterwards. So when the Science Gallery came looking for an item to put on display she emailed them: Eureka!

Explaining the mechanics of overcoming failure is what made the night so fascinating. For O’Sullivan it effectively meant giving up her running career and starting over again. She had to forget not just her failures, but the successes also. That was the critical thing – she had to forget about the past, stop comparing pre- and post-Atlanta and substitute pessimism with optimism.

Epiphany
Only then could she build again towards a successful future. And, for the first time,

accept that running is not everything in life.

At that point Dr Robertson intervened, saying that giving up on success is one of the hardest psychological hurdles to overcome. For O’Sullivan, it was not easy, although what happened in Atlanta did make her a better athlete and a better person. It still helps now, in all aspects of her life, like in raising her two daughters, Ciara and Sophie. When certain things don’t work out for them, O’Sullivan remembers and tells them: “You can’t win everything . . . you don’t always get what you want”. O’Sullivan may not have won the medal she craved in Sydney, but silver was a long way from failure.

Later I told her about how we in the sports media take great joy in distinguishing between success and failure, particularly on the Olympic stage. That might never change, but as long as the athlete knows the difference between real and perceived failure, she said, it hardly matters. And as long as they come back and fail better next time. Because if O’Sullivan had the chance to run her career again, she would change nothing. Had she won that gold medal in Atlanta would she be in a better place now? She doubts it, somehow, and there’s a lesson in that for us all.

The Fail Better exhibition runs at the Science Gallery until April 24th. For more information see www.sciencegallery.com/failbetter