Siren song of Schools keeps calling me back

ON ATHLETICSTHE SPORTS editor has a great knack of sending me to an athletics event and make it sound like he's doing me a favour. "Go on and do those Irish Schools Championships so," he says to me, clearly passing it off as a labour of love.

As if I have nothing better to do with my Saturdays than drive to Tullamore, sit in an airtight press box for eight hours, and painstakingly record the name, school and performance of the top three finishers in each of the 104 events. Not forgetting the relays. As if anyone would love to do that.

It's been this way since I first started writing for The Irish Times. (It was exactly 10 years ago next Monday, by the way. I came in on a six-week work placement, unpaid. The sports editor managed to extend the placement indefinitely, and keeps promising to add me to the permanent payroll one of these days.)

From early on my eagerness to write about athletics was the giveaway. Now, there's no going back. So when the sports editor rings me up in Beijing next August at 2am, forgetting we're seven hours ahead, looking for that fifth piece of the day I'm down to file, unaware my last clean T-shirt is plastered to my back with sweat and I'm nursing a blinding hangover having drunk several litres of Tsingtao the previous night to drown the sorrow of the last Irish athlete being eliminated - sure, he'll pass all that off as a labour of love.

It would want to be a labour of love considering I've already lost track of all the places these athletics events have taken me over the past 10 years: Seville, Moscow, Edmonton, Lisbon, Birmingham, Helsinki, Edinburgh, Osaka, Athens (Georgia and Greece), Brussels, Munich, London, Paris, Madrid, New York, Gothenburg, Budapest and Monte Carlo come to mind, and I know there are dozens more.

Still there's nothing like the Irish Schools to bring it all back home. This is where my athletics career began, first as a competitor, later as a reporter.

It's 20 years now since I started out in the intermediate boys' 3,000 metres. The Irish Schools has a qualification process equalled in ruthlessness only by the US Olympic trials. If you don't make the top three in your province you don't get to go to the show. I watched the Irish Schools that year from the grassy bank of the Belfield track.

A year later, running the senior boys 1,500 metres, I snuck third in the Leinster Schools. Suddenly the Irish Schools became all-consuming. I gave up chocolate, was in bed by 9.30 every night. Then, the week before the finals, my grandmother died. This promptly put things in perspective, and all thoughts of running disappeared. The race seemed inconsequential yet became emotionally charged, and I again snuck third, the bronze medal, which to this day feels as good as winning.

Every year I go back to the Irish Schools the sense of longing and nostalgia becomes greater, and no harm. It's what Tennessee Williams described as "the sweet bird of youth" and there's no denying, with the possible exception of Waikiki Beach with a Chi Chi in hand, there's nowhere else I'd rather be this afternoon than in Tullamore.

Only yesterday, the postman told me I must love my job. I didn't get a chance to respond before he added that I get to go to the Olympics, enjoy the best seats in the house, stay in a fancy hotel, and sometimes even get to do co-commentary with Greg Allen on RTÉ radio. I got the feeling he was more a radio than a newspaper person, and probably never fully understood the word "deadline".

Whenever these athletics events produce an Irish medal the sports editor usually rings up as if I'm on my honeymoon.

"Go off and enjoy yourself tonight," he says.

Truth is, an Irish medal trebles the workload and typically means I collapse into bed after one beer and nothing to eat since breakfast except a few cashews.

Two years ago, when Derval O'Rourke won that brilliant silver medal at the European Championships in Gothenburg, we had to wait over an hour for the official photo-finish result. Eventually, I filed two pieces, right on the buzzer, and in our haste to find a bar, myself and my dad took the wrong (last) tram and ended up several miles north of Gothenburg. We didn't get a drink at all that night.

There is some consolation if the medals are won on a Saturday, in that I don't have to file until the Sunday. Three years ago David Gillick and Alistair Cragg both won gold medals on the Saturday evening of the European Indoor championships in Madrid, which meant I soon moved on to the harder stuff. I'm still not sure if or how I filed my report the next day.

In terms of workload, emotion, and pure nervous excitability, what always elevated these athletics events to a whole other level was the presence of Sonia O'Sullivan. Whenever she was involved it wasn't merely a race, it was an event, and although as a reporter I only really caught the end days of her great career, no other Irish athlete comes even close to the range of subject matter provided by O'Sullivan.

There is ample reminder of this in an RTÉ documentary to be screened tomorrow evening. Sonia's Last Lap is a brilliant reflection not just of her extraordinary success on the track, but also of her life off the track, from her Cobh upbringing to the enduring love of running she now shares with her daughters, Ciara and Sophie, and partner, Nic Bideau.

During a sneak preview of the documentary (another perk of the job) there were several moments that sent shivers down the spine, despite the heavy familiarity. The way this fragile young girl combined raw talent with bold determination to conquer the world of distance running seems more stirring today than it ever was, partly because it's now increasingly clear we will never see her likes again.

There are tears, lots of them. The scene after her first great moment of triumph - winning the World Championship in 1995 - also ends in tears after some stupid journalist makes a big deal about O'Sullivan not carrying the Irish flag on her victory lap. RTÉ's George Hamilton tries to be sympathetic in getting her reaction, but O'Sullivan, looking tanned and incredibly fit and the world-beater that she is, suddenly breaks down just like that fragile young girl.

So much of the national fascination with O'Sullivan was that she never lost that fragility, and one measure of her talent is that until the end all of us continued to watch, and hope. I got to report on her last three major championships - in Munich 2002, Paris 2003, and finally Athens 2004 - and now realise that was and always will be the peak of this labour of love.

O'Sullivan was my first icon of the sport and no matter how many more years I'm in the job those moments won't ever be surpassed.

Sonia's Last Lap is screened tomorrow on RTÉ 1 at 6.30pm.

" The Irish Schools Championships has a qualification process equalled in ruthlessness only by the US Olympic trials; if you don't make the top three in your province you don't get to go to the show - I watched from the grassy bank of the Belfield track . . .