Eye-opener for Irish and challenge now on to reach summit
WHEN it comes to gauging the success – or indeed failure – of an Irish team at an athletics championships, medals are a fickle measurement. Good thing, too, because a simplistic judgment as the Irish make their long, complicated trek home from Torun in Poland is to point to the lack of excess baggage and roll the eyes.
But to do so would be to overlook the progress made in many areas. Ninth-place finishes don’t make headlines, but it’d be incorrect to label Sarah Lavin’s result in yesterday’s 60m hurdles as anything but a success after she clocked 8.07 to narrowly miss the final.
So too for Phil Healy’s fourthplace finish in the 400m and Andrew Coscoran’s seventh in the men’s 1500m.
That trio all matched or surpassed expectations, even if none was calling for their coronation. In the aftermath all three spoke only about how they need to get better.
High
For others, this was an eyeopener, a signal of just how high a standard is required to reach the podium. When Ciara Mageean pulled out last week and the search began for any potential medallists, the shortlist was brief: Phil Healy, Síofra CléirighButtner, Nadia Power, Mark English and Coscoran.
That none of the 800m trio – English, Cléirigh-Buttner and Power – could win a medal was not a surprise. But the fact none made the final suggested they either were not arriving in the same form as previous championships (in English’s case) or found the white-hot heat of championship racing an altogether different prospect to paced races on the circuit (which seemed to be the case for Power and CléirighButtner).
Phil Healy, like that 800m trio, went in ranked in the top six but she was the sole athlete among that quartet to perform to her best.
In truth, she went further, joining the ranks of the European elite by taking victory in both her 400m heat and semi-final, before that ferocious effort which came up just one fifth of a second shy of a medal.
It’s a race she will replay a thousand times in her head in the future, but the reality she will already have accepted is that was she was beaten by three better athletes on the day, her performance one with which she and her coach, Shane McCormack, should be most proud.
Before the championships, Ireland had four 800m women ranked in the world top 20 on season’s bests, and there’s no point pretending it was anything other than a collective underperformance that none of the trio competing here made the final, with just one, Power, making the last 18.
Such experiences, difficult as they are, can discourage and sap the strength of many careers, but they can also embolden.
If something stood out from chatting to Power afterwards, it was her distaste about the result, her resolve to come back stronger.
That, you’d hope, is the kind of attitude 18-year-olds Cian McPhillips and Israel Olatunde will take away from their first try at this level.
And there was much
encouragement from the middledistance crew. Training partners Coscoran and Paul Robinson both made the 1500m final.
For Robinson, it capped a glorious comeback, making his first European final since 2014, with too many injuries to count in the intervening years. Few, if any, deserved that more.
Seán Tobin (below) turned in a typically strong showing to make the men’s 3000m final, his 11th-place finish and a decent run by team-mate Brian Fay proving that the work done by Feidhlim Kelly at the Dublin Track Club – in bringing Ireland’s best together to train and in refusing to settle for mediocrity – is reaping dividends. It wasn’t a great championships for the Irish, but nor was it a bad one.
Some fell way below expectations, most levelled off right around them, and a select few surpassed them. The path to changing that ratio for the better in the future hinges on how they all react to it from now on.