SONIA O’SULLIVAN WAS, and to some degree always will be, a supreme athlete.
She is a fanatic — a person with a deep, burning and unerring love of sport.
Without this insatiable desire, she would not have become an Irish legend. She would not have won 11 medals, including an Olympic silver and World Championships gold. And she would not have represented Ireland internationally for almost 20 years, competing in four Olympic Games, six World Cross Country Championships, six World Track and Field Championships and five European Championships, while setting numerous records (some of which remain intact to this day) in the process.
There has never been an athlete like O’Sullivan, and there never will be. The drive and obsessiveness it takes to reach the pinnacle of the sport is incomprehensible to most. And that’s partially why Irish athletics has since struggled to live up to the incredibly lofty standards set by the Cobh native.
Earlier this year, another once-great Irish athlete, Damien Duff, spoke of the “hours of practice” and almost irrational level of dedication he put in to become a professional footballer, while suggesting the culture now of “tablets, iPhones for 10 and 11-year-olds” is holding back kids with similar potential.
And there are echoes of Duff’s sentiments in what O’Sullivan says about the similar problems with development in Irish athletics.
There is so much other stuff for kids these days, it is very hard for them to focus on just one thing when it is not always going right for them.
“There’s always that question in the back of your mind, if I put all my time into this one thing, what if I don’t get anything at the end of it, what will I do then?”
O’Sullivan explains that the period between school and college seems particularly problematic for aspiring stars, though she can’t quite identify why.
There are always good young athletes — if you go to Irish schools, there is some great talent.
“Just the development from that age through to seniors, something seems to go wrong there.”
And while the recent European Championships looked set to be somewhat underwhelming from an Irish perspective, suddenly Ciara Mageean delivered a performance to remember, winning a 1500m bronze medal in the process.
O’Sullivan, who was watching on as an analyst in the studio for RTÉ, was both delighted and somewhat relived at the outcome.
When Ciara won a medal, we forgot about everything else — that happens a lot, someone saves the day. Anything you’ve been wondering about up until that point, you park it.
“It’s quite tiring doing the TV work, because your head is going the whole time and you don’t realise it while you’re doing it.
“With Ciara winning a medal you only really had to talk about one person, we didn’t even have to pick out our highlight of the week, which is always a difficult thing to do when you don’t have success, but it was obvious this weekend.”
Watching alongside O’Sullivan at the weekend was another former Irish athlete, Jerry Kiernan, who is also Mageean’s coach. While expressing delight with the success, Kiernan also lamented his protégé narrowly missing out on second place.
And O’Sullivan agrees that it should have been silver for the Portaferry athlete. Tactically, the run was not quite perfect, and the 46-year-old Corkonian relates the situation to her own career.
I think if I had waited a little bit longer, I would have got the gold medal (at the Olympics) in Sydney as well. You can speculate as much as you like, and you could do things differently, but you can’t change it, so the important thing is that Ciara looks at the race.
“Ciara said it herself she is disappointed and she feels she could have done better, which is probably obvious to everyone watching it, but the only way she can change that is when she goes out in her next race to do things differently or be more aware of where she is, as they get into the business part of the race.
And particularly in a race like that, it was extra slow and there were a lot of people around, that’s always a difficult thing in 1500m races — it’s crowded and you end up in a lot of traffic, so how do you get out of there.
“The girl who won, Angelika Cichocka, was always in the right position, she was probably the most dominant in the race without anyone even seeing her. She was never on the inside, she was always on the outside, and I would (like to) be on the outside too. But you learn that and Ciara, in her head, wanted to run 1500m, she didn’t want to run any longer.
If you’re running four-minute pace, that’s fine, and generally it spreads out a lot more, and there’s a lot more gaps, so you can get through a lot easier. But when you’re running at a schoolgirl pace, everybody can keep up. You don’t have to be an Olympic athlete to keep up. When it comes down to it, it’s a 400m race rather than a 1500m race.”
And while Mageean has not been a particularly high-profile name in Irish sport up until this point, from a young age, she has been highly thought of in athletics circles.
Although she gave notice of her potential by winning at silver medal at the World Junior Championships in 2010 and emulating this achievement at the Europeans in 2011, it has been far from an easy path to success since then.
A few years ago, a bone spur in Mageean’s heel made running impossible. She ultimately had little option but to undergo make-or-break surgery, which ultimately proved successful.
Fortunately, the Irish star recuperated, but the injury had put her out of action for an extensive period and she missed the London 2012 Olympic Games as a result. Naturally, in the two years it took her to fully recover from this significant setback, some people wondered whether she would ever get the chance to fulfill the early promise she had shown.
Last Sunday consequently was the completion of a remarkable comeback for the Down native, who O’Sullivan has known for many years now. The legendary athlete honed her skills on the track while studying accountancy at Villanova University in Pennsylvania during the early 1990s, and she also advised a young Mageean to go stateside to continue her development on the track and off it. In the end, however, the youngster stuck closer to home, studying physiotherapy in UCD.
“I remember sitting down with her in 2010,” O’Sullivan recalls. “She had come back with her medal and she was doing an interview and we had a chat about her maybe going to college in America but I could sense she had no interest in doing that.
At the same time, it has still taken her five years to become a good senior athlete so looking back on that, it is comparable to when I did go to college in America except that I was more hidden away where she was more visible here with expectations each year on what she was doing.
“Between junior and senior it can take four to five years to reach your best and the athletes who persist the most are the ones who are going to be successful. She’s come out and done that now, so the belief and the confidence just flows from there.”
And these days, O’Sullivan’s connection with sport is not just restricted to commentating from TV studios — indeed, far from it. Although her career in international athletics ended in 2007, she remains an avid runner. These days, the former star is similarly inclined to go cycling or swimming, particularly now that her ongoing recovery from a stress fracture to the ankle has temporarily curtailed participation in the activity for which she is best known.
Speaking at the launch of the Vodafone Dublin City Triathlon, she is also unsurprisingly a big fan of the sport she is promoting, and is hopeful of taking part in the aforementioned event in the Phoenix Park on 28 August, despite her recent injury problems.
Moreover, having gone from participating in front of thousands of people with the stakes unimaginably high to these much more casual sporting endeavours, does O’Sullivan still get the same buzz out of competing?
You set your own targets and challenges and you set the goals that you want to achieve. In a way, I try to do that all the time but often when I turn up at events there is an expectation on you to do really well so you feel under a little bit of pressure to go out there and perform. I quite enjoy it because I suppose you adapt to what you’re doing.”
And while O’Sullivan has long been thought of as world class in the field of athletics, it of course doesn’t make her automatically competent when it comes to trying her hands at other sports.
Whenever I started swimming, I was out of breath (very quickly) and I thought: ‘How can you swim for such a long time?’ And then you learn how to swim properly and you learn how to do it and you do training sessions in the pool.
“I’d have no problem swimming for an hour now, because you break it down into little pieces and like running, if you meet up with other people and you swim with other people, it’s much more fun and social even though there’s not much talking (while competing).
It’s the same with cycling — last weekend, I went down to Wicklow for a cycle. I wanted to go and just googled: ‘Where is there cycling (in Wicklow)? The Bray Wheelers were having a cycle. It was great, everyone was really friendly, I went out in a group.
“It absolutely poured down rain. But it was warm rain, and it was one of those things where it had looked like raining, and the phone said there was a 100% chance of it raining. I put the bike in the car and had my breakfast, and said: ‘Sure, I might as well go anyway. What would I be doing here?’”
Sonia O’Sullivan has been appointed ambassador and champion to the 2016 Vodafone Dublin City Triathlon, taking place on August 28th in the heart of the capital. Vodafone, Ireland’s leading total communications provider, is encouraging employees to take part in the event to raise money for Vodafone Foundation Ireland’s charity partner ISPCC Childline. For more information visit dublincitytriathlon.com.
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