Track elites keeping the Beijing project in perspective

ATHLETICS:DERVAL O'ROURKE attended a fashion show recently as the special guest of her sponsors, Spar. After the show she got to meet one of the supermodels that had strutted along the catwalk with daunting self-assurance, and who on hearing O'Rourke had qualified for Beijing seemed very impressed.

"So you're really going to the Olympics? So have you started training yet?" asked the model.

O'Rourke didn't know whether to laugh or cry, so she laughed. Supermodels have a reputation for being a little out of touch with reality, people who think climate change is what happens when you open the fridge door to get a Diet Coke. Yet in this instance the supermodel was probably as tuned in to the whole Olympic phenomenon as most people.

Just last Sunday, David Gillick was flying back from Crete, and the woman sitting next to him on the plane inquired as to how he enjoyed his holiday. Gillick politely replied that he was actually there to compete in an athletics meeting.

"Oh really? So will you be going to the Olympics then?"

Gillick had to think for a second before he answered. Should he say yes or no? Because he knew exactly what the next question was going to be.

I can sort of relate to this. At a neighbour's house one Christmas Day, friends of theirs heard I was big into running and doing quite well.

"So will you go the Olympics, will you?" one of them asked. "And will you win the Olympics, will you?"

I was 13 years old at the time.

The sports photographer Brendan Moran can relate to this as well. I know he won't mind me saying it, but Moran would not exactly have your average Olympic physique, if you know what I mean. He recently went down to his local gym to start whipping himself into shape for the big assignment in Beijing and was asked at the sign-in desk about his fitness targets.

"Well, I'm going to the Olympics," he answered, "and I need to lose a little weight before that."

They looked at him in amazement; seemingly believing this was someone they'd be watching on their TV screens in August. (Moran, by the way, is a brilliant photographer; look out for his pictures from Beijing.)

With so many people out there largely uninformed about the true demands and size of the Olympics - and who can blame them, since proper athletics coverage in the media is practically non-existent? - it is heartening to know O'Rourke and Gillick are not letting it get to them.

On Wednesday, they both took time out of their crazy-hard training schedules and gave us all the time we wanted to quiz them on their preparations for Beijing. For over an hour, they did group interviews, then one-on-ones, and it's no exaggeration to say every question was "Olympics-this?" and "Olympics-that?", which soon created an overwhelming sense of absurdity that their whole lives were now revolving around this one, fleeting moment in Beijing. In the end, we had to take stock.

"Someone else referred to me recently as an 'Olympic contestant'," said O'Rourke, "as if I was on Pop Idol or something. Or like you're handed a lottery ticket and off you go to the Olympics.

"So you can't really take that too seriously. And you can't take it personally either, because they just don't have the knowledge of what it is you do, the same way I don't have the knowledge of what it is they do.

"I competed in Athens four years ago, and what that taught me was that you can't put everything into one day in four years. You can only hope it all works out, but if it doesn't, life moves on."

Beijing will be Gillick's first Olympics, but he's keeping it all in check as well. He works with the sports psychologist and Armagh footballer Enda McNulty, and while Beijing is undoubtedly the most important thing in Gillick's career right now, they're not plotting it as the only thing. "That's what happens in Olympic year. Everyone suddenly wakes up to it. But Enda actually turned around to me the other day and asked, 'What if Beijing goes pear-shaped?' I was like, 'What do you mean?' He said, 'What happens? What's after that?'

"He said it's like you're driving along the road, and there's a big truck coming towards you. You're thinking you'll never get past this. Then you look in the rear-view mirror and it's gone. That's the way to look at it. For this year, it seems like the only thing that matters. But it will soon be gone, and other things start coming towards you.

"With athletics, regardless of what happens in Beijing, we'll have a European Indoors next March and a World Championships next August. Things just move on, to other big championships. So it's important to realise as well exactly what the Olympics are about. It's definitely not a matter of life or death."

Truth is most people watch the Olympics on TV like they would a midweek film. They may comment on it for a while but the following day have forgotten all about it. They'll probably have a go at the Irish athletes for not making the finals and curse our hopelessness when it comes to winning medals. And then they'll catch the late headlines on RTÉ for a bedtime dose of reality.

On that note, and I hate to be the bearer of bad news, there are just 55 days now until the opening ceremony in Beijing, and the chances of an Irish medal - at least in athletics - appear to be getting slimmer by the day.

It's not that the Irish athletes are getting any worse - Gillick, along with Paul Hession, Eileen O'Keeffe and the race walkers Robert Heffernan and Olive Loughnane are all showing excellent form - but the opening weeks of the season have made it clear just how competitive things will be in Beijing.

We've already had three high-quality world records: 9.72 for 100 metres by Jamaica's Usain Bolt; 14:11.15 for 5,000 metres by Ethiopia's Tirunesh Dibaba; and 12.87 for 110-metre hurdles last Thursday night by Cuba's Dayron Robles. It's been a while since athletics has had three world records like that so early in the season, and we could see several more before Beijing.

We have also seen two extraordinary new talents emerge in Sudan's Abubaker Kaki and Kenya's Pamela Jelimo - both of them still only 18 and yet clear threats to the long-standing 800-metre world records.

Kaki ran an awesome 1:42.69 in Oslo a week ago - the first sub-1:43 clocking for 800 metres in five years - improving the world junior record by a second.

Jemilo, an equally freakish talent, ran 1:54.99 in Berlin, also a world junior record.

Jeremy Wariner has run a sub-44-second 400 metres prior to the US trials for the first time.

Ethiopia's Kenenisa Bekele has already run 26:25.97 for 10,000 metres, and it's only a matter of time before Blanka Vlasic of Croatia breaks the women's high-jump world record.

I could go on, but the point is Beijing is shaping up to be the hottest track-and-field competition of all time, and I don't mean temperature-wise.

Just as well O'Rourke and Gillick have it all in perspective. It would be unbearable if they allowed Beijing become otherwise.