– Niall Kelly reports from Rio de Janeiro
“WHEN IS IT? I haven’t even looked.”
Thomas Barr didn’t really consider that he might be running in an Olympic final this week. That seemed like a stretch for a man who hadn’t broken 50 seconds in this, a year ruined by frustration and injury disruption.
And then Barr arrived in Rio and everything clicked. He sliced more than a second off his season’s best in the prelims, clocking in at 48.93, to book his place in the 400m hurdles semis.
Maybe the year wasn’t totally ruined just yet.
What followed on Tuesday night in Rio’s Olympic Stadium will go down as one of the great Irish moments of these Olympic Games — one of the great moments of Irish athletics, it’s fair to say. Barr rounded the bend and scythed his way up the home straight to win his semi-final in a magnificent 48.39.
A new personal best by 0.26 seconds. A new national record. Lane four in the final (4pm Irish time), sitting pretty between Javier Culson and Kerron Clement, two men who are no strangers to the Olympic podium.
And to top it all, the first Irish man to qualify for an Olympic sprint final on the track since Bob Tisdall took gold in the very same event all the way back in 1932.
“Jesus, that is unreal,” a delighted Barr said as the full magnitude of his achievement sunk in.
I can’t believe I’m standing here having run a 48-something. I didn’t think I had that time in me.
“Last year I was on top of my game. This year with injury and preparation, nothing was good. I didn’t feel prepared — today I did, after yesterday, but not coming into the championships.”
A niggling hip injury has undermined everything, the memory of last season’s strong form only multiplying the frustration.
Barr, 24, had been off the track for 11 weeks before he returned at the National Championships in June. He was fit enough to travel to Amsterdam for Europeans a couple of weeks later but his best — 50.09 — wasn’t nearly good enough for a place in the final.
“Amsterdam gave me a baseline and gave me something to work on,” he explains.
“I was really frustrated because I didn’t want to be a 50-point athlete, but I found each session I did, with each run out, I was getting more and more back to my old self. I was coming together nicely and things were clicking into place.”
You can say that again.
Barr lists off the people who have worked day and night to get him to this point: coaches Hayley and Drew Harrison, and physiotherapist Emma Gallivan to name but three.
“I’m shaking like a leaf,” he said. “I didn’t know what to do, what to think, after I saw the time out on the track.
“I’m just so excited and happy that everything came together because I so easily could not have been here.
I’m not going to say it was the perfect race because there’s one or two things I can work on. I don’t think I got out as hard as I could have. That was definitely 0.1 of a second there alone, Hayley will have a couple of things I can work at.
“I came in only having run 50-point, but I always find as rounds go on in a championship they get easier. Now I’m completely familiar with the warmup track and warmup procedures. In a final, anything can happen.”
Anything indeed, in what looks to be a wide-open race missing some of the event’s biggest names. Nicholas Bett, the Kenyan world champion, crashed out in the heats while world bronze medallist, Jeffery Gibson, limped out as an existing injury took its toll.
The man who split them in Beijing, Denis Kudryavtsev, is Russian and subject to the IAAF’s blanket ban on track and field athletes. Of the medallists from London four years ago, only Culson, who finished third, returns.
If the coaching instructions from Hayley ahead of the semi-final are anything to go by, Barr will set out to do more of the same.
“To come from where I have, when I left her (in Ireland), I wasn’t in great shape and wasn’t running like myself. She said when I was out there I looked like my old self.
“I was back sprinting again. She said go replicate the same thing in the semi-final, do exactly what you did — and I went faster.”
He is, indisputably given the circumstances, already deep into bonus territory. When he steps into those blocks this afternoon, he will believe that he can emulate Tisdall — if not by winning gold, then by bringing home a medal.
“I did say it joking,” he said, “but anything is possible.”
– This article was amended at 13.15 to reflect Barr’s previous PB of 48.65.
