Athletics: The day Treacy ruled the World in the mud of Limerick
A SPECIAL band of athletics brothers will be honoured with a particularly timely commemorative award in a Dublin hotel this afternoon.
Ireland hosts the European Cross-Country Championships in Santry next Sunday and 30 years ago, on Limerick Racecourse, these men left an indelible athletics legacy to inspire future generations in this most quintessential of Irish sporting disciplines.
The image of a mud-spattered 21-year-old John Treacy retaining his World Cross-Country title in Greenpark on March 25, 1979 still endures.
What is often forgotten is that the subsequent Olympic silver medallist also led Ireland to team silver medals that day in front of a phenomenal 30,000 crowd.
Donegal postman Danny McDaid -- 'The man with the cap' -- came home an heroic 11th.
Gerry Deegan (43rd), Mick O'Shea (39th), Donie Walsh (47th) and the late Tony Brien (50th) packed brilliantly to pip Russia by just a point to take second, and Eamonn Coghlan, Ray Treacy and Eddie Leddy were also part of the team.
Ireland has hosted one other cross-country major since -- the 2002 Worlds in Leopardstown -- where the women's team, led by Sonia O'Sullivan (seventh), took short-course bronze.
difficult
That event was delayed by a year because of the foot-and-mouth outbreak and, for a variety of reasons, never captured the public's imagination quite like Limerick.
What few knew was just how difficult it was to pull off such a huge operation back in '79, especially considering it coincided with a three-month postal strike.
In those pre-email days -- heck it was even pre-automated telephone days -- this caused havoc as BLE had no way to receive entries from abroad.
Local hammer thrower Bernie Hartigan, a member of the organising committee, came up with an ingenious solution.
Hartigan worked for Aer Lingus in Shannon and he got the stewardesses to post the entry forms in London and also created an address there where they could also collect the international entries and courier them home.
"Bernie's idea was a brilliant one, he was a fantastic organiser, but we couldn't tell anyone how we did it," reveals Ronnie Long, another key local man on the organising committee who, like Hartigan, will also be among those honoured today.
The '79 organisers proved innovative in other ways. It was the first World Cross-Country championships to allow spectators onto the course, which particularly added to the dramatic finale when Treacy was mobbed.
It was also the first time that BLE pre-sold tickets for an event (£2 each), and also the first time that there was official merchandising.
Profits from the event later helped BLE to purchase their own offices in Dublin.
One particularly smart move was the organisers' decision, well in advance, to ask all the major sporting organisations locally to clear their calendar for March 25 that year.
"Limerick FC were playing Galway United and they switched to an away venue. It was a big Sunday for cup rugby, but we went to the Munster branch and they cancelled all their fixtures," Long recalls.
"There were very few GAA matches on but where they could they helped us, and I think nearly all the junior soccer matches in Munster were put off that day.
"Everyone in Limerick just got behind the event and we got really marvellous support.
"Making sure we didn't clash with any other fixture really helped to draw the crowd but, of course, the real clincher was the fact that John had won the title in Glasgow the year before," Long points out.
When Treacy, a junior bronze medallist in 1974 and '75, came home three seconds ahead of Russian Alexandra Antipov in equally muddy conditions in Bellahouston Racecourse in '78, and the Irish men's team were sixth, it was immediately a case of 'roll on Limerick!'
Not even a full day's rainfall beforehand dampened the enthusiasm of athletes or fans.
"It still amazes me when I think back on that morning because I knew, from the moment I woke up, that I was going to win," Treacy has revealed. "That was something that never happened to me before or after in my career."
The huge crowd went wild when the Waterford star passed the 1977 champion, Leon Schots (Belgium), midway through the second lap, and not even a subsequent fall in the quagmire could stop him from coming home nine seconds clear of Poland's Bronislaw Malinowski, with Antipov third.
Treacy still describes Limerick as one of the few "perfect races" in his storied career.
"There was no pain whatsoever. Even if there had been another three laps in the race it would not have mattered in the slightest, I was totally in control," he said.
Nineteen years later his heroic feat was bettered by Sonia O'Sullivan, at the height of her power.
She won both World titles in 1998 when the inaugural 'short course' was introduced, but the location -- Marrakech -- gave it less resonance at home.
And it is still Catherina McKiernan who will be fondly remembered as Ireland's queen of cross-country for winning four consecutive World silver medals from 1992.
She also won the inaugural Europeans in Alnwick (Northumberland) in '94 and was a scoring member when Ireland's women took a team bronze in the Europeans in Edinburgh in 2003, when O'Sullivan was fourth.
McKiernan believes firmly that cross-country is a natural event for Irish athletes and that the natural topography of her native Cavan played a vital part in her success.
"Cross-country is what every child in their local athletics club starts out doing here, a lot of the time because their club has no other facility," she says.
"Running around our farm at home was the most natural thing in the world for me.
"I was probably lucky, too, with the sort of land we have in Cavan. I used to train around Cavan Golf Club, which is really hilly. When I was doing recovery sessions I would still be going up and down.
"Even the lane leading up to our house back at home (Cornafean), it's about an 800m-900m climb," McKiernan adds. "The reality was, if you went down our lane you had to come back up it!"
She realised the great training advantage of her local terrain when she travelled to Dublin one day for an appointment and popped around to the Phoenix Park to train.
"At the end of my session I actually felt I hadn't trained at all, because it was so flat!" she revealed. "That was when I first realised what was making me so strong.
"It was the same with racing internationally," she added.
"Cross-countries here in Ireland were always way tougher than when you'd go abroad to places like Belgium and Holland where their courses were so flat.
"I was so used to training on hills that, for me, they were a doddle."
Paradoxically, next Sunday's Santry Demesne course for the Europeans is the sort of flat, parkland course that is now in vogue for most international races.
When the 2002 Worlds were run in Leopardstown, McKiernan's first child was only a week old so she had to settle for spectating, as she will again next Sunday.
And, like Treacy and the men of '79, she will desperately willing on a new generation to take up her mantle and run with it.
Irish Independent
