News17 Mar 2004


Walking Firewoman aiming at Olympic success

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Gillian O'Sullivan (© Getty Images)

A silver medallist at the World Championships in Paris and winner of the inaugural IAAF Race Walking Challenge, Gillian O’Sullivan has set herself as Ireland’s best prospect for Athens Olympic Games. By Elliott Denman

Forty-seven years have flown by. Vast segments of the world's maps have undergone massive changes. An array of political leaders has come and gone in every corner of this planet. Scientific and technological advances have brought astounding changes in the way ordinary men and women lead their lives.

But the Republic of Ireland's list of gold medal winners in athletics - certainly then and just as surely now the flagship sport of the Olympic Games - hasn't moved forward at all. Not since the first day of December 1956 has a track and field athlete representing Ireland struck Olympic gold. And it took a huge upset for that to happen, at the historic Melbourne Games, the first Olympics ever held in the Southern Hemisphere.

Ronnie Delany, just 21 years old and a junior at Pennsylvania's Villanova University, sprinted from tenth to first in the final 300 meters - passing such illustrious rivals as Klaus Richtzenhan, John Landy, Laszlo Tabori, Stanislav Jungwirth, Brian Hewson and Murray Halberg - to win the 1500 metres in the Olympic record time of 3:41.2.

Moments after crossing the finish line with arms outstretched in joy, he dropped to his knees in prayer, a powerful, poignant - and still unforgettable - moment.

Ronnie Delany, still a most active presence on the Irish athletics scene, has seen a parade of Irish competitors trek off to Olympic Games at sites near and far in the ensuing years, but all of them to inevitably fall short of his golden standard.

Now, Ireland can dream golden new dreams of Olympic glory, of an Eire athlete leading home the world on sports' greatest stage, of a packed stadium saluting an epic feat by a determined athlete kitted out in kelly green.

Veteran distance runner Sonia O'Sullivan remains a potent force but the athlete who will carry Ireland's greatest hopes to Athens is 27-year-old race walker Gillian O'Sullivan (no relation.)

The women's 20-kilometre race walk will mark its second appearance on the Olympic Games program and Gillian O'Sullivan must be rated as a leading contender. The 1.63m-tall, 61-kg athlete nicknamed "The Firewoman" - for her flaming red hair - will head to Athens with impressive credentials.

A competitor since the age of 11, she has been improving at a steady rate and truly came of age in the 2003 season with two first places (in Tijuana and Sesto San Giovanni) and the overall title in the first IAAF Race Walking Challenge, followed by a strong silver medal performance in the World Championships in Paris. All this came on top of World record clockings for the 3000 metres indoors (11:35.34 in Belfast 15 Feb) and the 5000 metres outdoors (20:02.60 in Dublin 13 July)

Coached by Michael Lane and a member of the Farranfore Maine Valley Athletic Club, she is reaching peak form in precision fashion. "I have done a lot of competitions and have got a lot of experience," she said at the post-race press conference at Stade de France, citing the ingredients she will put to even greater use in the build-up to Athens.

"My dream has come true," confessed Paris champion Yelena Nikolayeva of Russia, perhaps the greatest women's race walker the discipline has ever seen. But calendars do not lie and Nikolayeva who was, at 37, the oldest champion ever crowned in the World Championships, cannot erase the decade-plus of age she must concede to O'Sullivan.

Perhaps the only safe speculation on the Athens 20km result is that the existing Olympic record of 1:29:05 by Wang Liping of China at the 2000 Sydney Games will be obliterated.

Nikolayeva walked a Championships record 1:26:52 in Paris, to O'Sullivan's 1:27:34 silver and Valentina Tsybulskaya's 1:28:10 bronze for Belarus.

Of course, it's never-ever safe to predict an Olympic result so long in advance, and such notables as World record holder Olimpiada Ivanova of Russia, Elisabetta Perrone of Italy, Athanasia Tsoumeleka of Greece, Claudia Stef of Romania, Hongjuan Song of China, Melanie Seeger of Germany, Susana Feitor of Portugal, Carolina Jimenez Munoz of Spain and Kjersti Platzer of Norway are among the many others posing mighty threats.

Still, no one in women's race walking is coming along faster than O'Sullivan. The modern-era sport of race walking was created and codified in 19th-century Great Britain but it is neighbour Ireland making some of the biggest news on the World race walking scene these days.

"We've had race walking in Ireland for a long, long time but it's only in recent years that we've made this kind of progress," said Pierce O'Callaghan, press officer for Athletics Ireland, the national federation, and a former top-rank race walker himself.

"The big thing is that race walking is totally integral to the sport here. Young athletes have the same opportunity to compete in race walking, as they might have in any other event.

"From the juveniles and the kids, all the way up, they have the full opportunity, as well as the coaching and the encouragement, to compete in race walking. "So what Gillian has been doing, and quite a few others (the likes of Jamie Costin, Robert Heffernan and Olive Loughnane) have been doing, is certainly no accident." Costin and Loughnane, too, represented Ireland in Paris.

Raised in the town of Farranfore, County Kerry, O'Sullivan was attracted to race walking as a schoolgirl and gained her first real notice with a victory as a 13-year-old in the 600-metre walk at the Ireland-wide Community Games.

"The whole idea of the Community Games is wonderful," said O'Callaghan. "Youngsters are brought along from local to county to national competitions; race walking is a big part of it, and the emphasis is always on developing speed as well as excellent technique; the races are fully judged, just as any others, and the youngsters get that important kind of experience, as well."

By 1994, at age 17, O'Sullivan was ready to raise her sights. She made her international debut in the World Junior Championships and finished a far-from-noteworthy 22nd in the five-kilometre race in Lisbon.

But, more importantly, the seeds of subsequent successes were sown; a year later, she placed ninth in the European Juniors 5km. In March of 1999, she won the British Race walking Association's 20km Championship.

She'd won her first Irish National Championship over the 10km distance in 1996; when the distance doubled to 20km in the Irish Nationals of 1999, she won that, too. Her streak of Irish 20km crowns reached five with her 1:29:22 triumph at Dublin's Phoenix Park this July.

"I'm delighted with the performance," she said. "I'm in heavy training for Paris and it was particularly satisfying to break 1:30 again this year, especially on tired legs."

"Her training sessions are legendary," O'Callaghan marvels. "She's so strong; she never breaks down." By the morning of 24 August in Paris, the "tired legs” were a distant memory; O'Sullivan was prepared to take on the world.

The Kerrywoman was in the thick of the hunt from the start, but conceded a 20-second advantage to Nikolayeva by the midway point.

Still, she distanced herself from Tsybulskaya, and all the rest, and blazed home, waving her arms in delight, for just the third medal ever won by Ireland at the World Championships (Eamonn Coghlan in 1983 and Sonia O'Sullivan in 1995 had won 5000m titles.)

"The hardest part was around 13 to 17 kilometres," she said after crossing the finish line. "There were constant changes behind me and I had to push all I could."

"It's fantastic," she said in the mixed zone. "I'm absolutely delighted for myself, my coach, my family and friends, because I had so much support out there, it was unbelievable."

Next May's IAAF World Cup of Race Walking in Naumburg, Germany will constitute a major stepping stone to Athens for O'Sullivan and the rest of the world's speediest pedestrians. Another major pre-Games test for O'Sullivan may be the Greek National Championship 20km, over the Olympic course, next June.

This will be her second Olympic appearance; her 2000 Sydney trip produced a 10th-place 1:33:10.

That initial women's Olympic 20km also produced its share of dismay with the late disqualification of Australian leader Jane Saville. But the Sydney situation also prodded IAAF officials into instituting state-of-the-art communications systems that have alleviated any shred of difficulty or controversy at each of the major race walk championships staged since then.

Saville has since fine-tuned her own technique and came through with an honourable 1:30:51 11th-place finish in Paris. O'Sullivan is an honours graduate of University College Cork, and a history teacher by profession. That career, however, has been kept on hold the last four years as she trains full-time in search of her golden goals. The pair of $30,000 checks she earned at the Race Walking Challenge and in Paris will keep plenty of sustenance on the O'Sullivan table.

The late Frank O'Reilly (1960) and John Kelly (1968) were Ireland's first  Olympic race walkers and are recognised as "the grandfathers of Irish walking."

Kelly, who now lives in Prescott, Arizona, USA, continues to take a keen interest in race walking and was in Paris, cheering for O'Sullivan along the Boulevard Jules Guesde road course.

"Gillian should be a national hero," said Kelly. "Frank (O'Reilly) and I gave it our best shot but, really, Ireland has never had anyone to match what she is doing now. She's a marvellous athlete."

Kelly was quite a marvel in his own right - moving from Ireland to Australia to New Zealand and the U.S., and from sport to sport as a successful rugby player, light-heavyweight boxer, hammer thrower, marathon runner and, finally, race walker.

After France, he and wife Katie (also a race walker) spent two weeks in Ireland where he was honoured by the good folks of Loughmoor, his old hometown, and a commemorative plaque was placed in his former school building. But it couldn't possibly compare to the greeting O'Sullivan earned on her return from Paris.

A huge turnout was there for a Homecoming Celebration parade through the streets of Killarney Town, and over 80,000 on hand at the All-Ireland Hurling Final at Croke Park, Dublin, roared their approval of her Paris performance. Now, it's back to the serious business of preparing for Athens. O'Sullivan has been around the world and back pursuing her vision.

She's trained with Sydney 20km/50km double champion Robert Korzeniowski of Poland in France and Mexico, keeping close to his pace in interval sessions. She knows that she'll be answering the most important starting gun of her life in very short order; Ireland knows that its favourite race walking lass will be ready and able.

Two-time Track and Field writer of the year and former race walker, Eliott Denman is a freelance journalist based in new Jersey, USA

Published in IAAF Magazine Issue 4 - 2003

 

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