Athletics: No medal, but Olive is tops for toughness
Olive Loughnane (L) from Ireland Photo: Oleg Nikishin/Epsilon/Getty Images
Friday August 22 2008
COULD you put down that 'Why Are We Irish So Useless?' banner there for a moment please, and feast your eyes on this tiny, teak-tough woman from Carrabane, outside Loughrea.
There she is, exactly what you wanted, all 5'3" and seven and a half stone of her. An Irish athlete who broke her personal best at the Olympics -- by 93 seconds!
Someone who finished seventh in her event and looks it, her mouth caked white with dried saliva and sweat, yet still grinning. An Irish athlete whose time (1:27.45) was so good that Olive Loughnane was among the 12 women who actually broke the old Olympic 20km walk record (1:29.05).
And yet she still didn't win a medal. "If you'd told me last night I was going to do 87 minutes 45 I'd have said get the flags ready, because I'd have thought that would have to medal!" Loughnane admitted.
"In a way I'm disappointed not to, but I still did amazingly well. I couldn't have done more."
Biblical
Her event took part in rainfall of such biblical proportions that it could have been listed under 'aquatics' in the adjacent Swimming Cube, yet she loved the conditions and toughed it out wondrously.
Race walking may suffer its share of sniggers and critics but these are tough women.
Two years ago Loughnane was in the pool training the day before she had her baby daughter (by pre-planned section) and was back in the water again eight days afterwards.
Five or six months later she did the Olympic 'A' standard but it didn't count as she did it before the qualifying period. Some big names virtually drowned around her yesterday.
Australia's Jane Saville, famously disqualified entering the stadium in Sydney, took bronze in Athens and hung onto her coat-tails until half-way but only finished 20th.
Ryta Turava, the long-time second-placed Belarusian, who repeatedly rammed her fist down her throat trying to make herself sick, was eventually 11th.
Yet Loughnane matched the best of them. She didn't go after Russia's world champion Olga Kaniskina who smashed the Olympic record by two-and-a-half minutes (1:26.31), but tucked herself into 13th by half-way and then intelligently picked her way through the field.
Irish race-walking Olympians have always held their own. Jimmy McDonald was sixth in Barcelona and Gillian O'Sullivan 10th in Sydney. But how does a 32-year-old mum who is self-coached since 2004, and favours training at home in Coachford (Cork), actually out-do Rob Heffernan's eighth here? Experience ... a lot of it bitter.
In Athens Loughnane was disqualified. She was 12th at the 2003 Worlds but in 2005 dropped out, and then sat out 2006 completely with her new baby. Last year she suffered a chronic iron deficiency yet somehow was 17th at the Worlds in Osaka.
And she kicked on with a series of sixth places on the international circuit this year, including the World Cup in Russia in May, where she set a new PB of 89:17.
"Struggling last year made me very, very tough," she explained. "I'm very strong now.
"I remember, around 14 km, thinking 'God this is tough!', but sure I was after doing an 8.42 lap. What was I looking for, a couch?
"And I didn't panic. There was people hanging off me, using me, and I was like 'whatever girls! If ye can stay with me fair play to ye!'"
She may be self-coached but she's not alone. There's husband Martin Corkery, (a former Cork junior footballer) and mentors like fellow Olympian Heffernan, Pat Ryan of Athletics Ireland, and her sports psychologist Canice Kennedy.
Question
"People question what you do when you're self-coached, but maybe they're just trying to figure out what you're doing that's making you go so well!" she laughed.
"I think I was genuinely the happiest person going into it," she enthused. "I was in the shape of my life ahead of a really big race, and here was my chance to show it. I finished seventh and now I've a great family to go back to."
Before departing for China her accreditation arrived and Eimear (2) got her mitts on it.
"There's a hologram over the picture and she was fascinated with that," she said. "And then she got the picture and kissed it, and well, that puts everything into perspective."
