On Athletics: Switching allegiance not a laughing matter

I got an email a few weeks ago from Alistair Cragg, and first thing he asked was how my dad was doing. Which was nice, considering I hadn’t heard from Cragg in about four years. And we were never exactly close.

He told me about some work he’s involved with in US athletics, asked about the status quo back here, and we agreed we might catch up in Rio. Which also reminded me about the first time we met, exactly 12 years ago, given all the talk this week about what it means to represent your country.

It was one month before the Athens Olympics, and Cragg was in Dublin to update some passport photos and complete a team medical.

He was 24 years old, already hailed as the future of Irish distance running, and it was the first time he’d ever stepped on Irish soil.

We sat drinking coffee in an airport hotel and he told me the story of how he’d come from South Africa to find himself running for another country he’d never even visited, nor for one second pretended to know much about. And I remember him being pretty humbled and appreciative of the opportunity it presented.

It was clear Cragg got here partly by fate, partly by accident, although never once by design.

What surprised me was, for as long as he could remember, he’d always held an Irish passport, but that only now, at age 24, was he beginning to understand what it felt like to run for Ireland, the strong sense of tradition which came with it.

It was also clear how much Cragg had already left behind, and a particularly difficult adolescence during a turbulent time in Johannesburg, where he was born on June 13th, 1980.

Better life

His parents were born there too, although there was an Irish link in that his mother’s great grandparents, from Dublin and Killarney, had moved to South Africa almost a century previous, seeking a better life in the diamond business.

He told me his grandmother was actually born underground in the famous mining area known as Kimberley. Later, when South Africa was emerging from apartheid, there was a small window which allowed his parents to give their children passports from the country of their great-grandparents and suddenly Ireland began to take on some personal relevance.

Still, that was only the beginning of Cragg’s journey: a promising junior, he got a scholarship to Southern Methodist University, in Dallas, only for things to slowly breakdown, mentally and physically, not helped by the tragedy surrounding his 16-year-old brother Andrew, who died seven months after a suicide attempt.

For a while Cragg found himself wandering the streets of London, where his parents had since moved, before he was offered a second scholarship chance, at Arkansas University, thanks to Mayo-born coach John McDonnell, who always recognised proper talent when he saw it.

Cragg soon repaid that faith, winning seven NCAA American collegiate titles at Arkansas and, around the time he graduated, in 2003, McDonnell convinced him his future was with Ireland.

Cragg wasn’t country hopping, he was simply hoping to find a country to represent, and we were both perfectly entitled and seemed delighted to have him represent us.

When we next met, a month later, Cragg had just finished 12th in the 5,000m final at those Athens Olympics, won by the Moroccan Hicham El Guerrouj.

He was the first European, Ireland’s only male track finalist yet, incredibly hard on himself, promising to do better next time.

Which is exactly what he did: six months later, at the European Indoors in Madrid, Cragg won a brilliant gold medal over 3,000m, making for one of the most celebrated nights in Irish athletics (David Gillick also won gold in the 400m); a year later, he finished fourth in the 3,000m at the World Indoors in Moscow, that race won Kenenisa Bekele from Ethiopia, and I don’t know has there been a better display of Irish distance running since then.

Emotional interview

Within two years, however, Cragg’s career began to fall apart. He scraped into the final of the 5,000m at the Beijing Olympics (again, our only male track finalist), and in the emotional interview which followed, questioned the fickleness of Irish athletics, how quick it can be to judge, or to dismiss.

Four years ago he qualified for his third Olympics, in London, didn’t make the final, and afterwards was asked by some journalists should he have even run?

Well, he never ran for Ireland again, and some people, I know, consider it a bit of a joke that he ever did. Even though, at least for me, most of time, it seemed clear Cragg wanted to do his country proud.

The problem now is trying to decipher when exactly representing your country does become a joke, or at least the sort of joke that Fionnuala McCormack suggested finishing fourth behind Yasemin Can, the Turkish runner formerly known as Vivian Jemutai from Kenya, who won gold over 10,000m at the European Championships in Amsterdam this week.

Global sport

Whatever about being funny, it certainly wasn’t fair that an athlete like Jemutai could switch allegiance within a year, although that wasn’t her fault, given certain rules of global sport simply allow for it, the same rules that allow us to claim certain divers, swimmers, gymnasts, rowers, cyclists and yes runners and walkers too as part of the Irish team at next month’s Rio Olympics.

Where, by the way, Alistair Cragg will also be, not competing but supporting his wife, Amy, who has qualified to represent the US in the Olympic marathon. But that’s another story.