A lmost three weeks to go and maybe you are thinking, if you have spared the Olympics a thought at all, that this four-yearly sporting festival in which a motley crew of Irish competitors with unfamiliar names struggle to keep up with more vaunted and better-funded rivals isn't your scene. If so, best to avert your eyes. This story probably isn't for you.

Last week the members of Ireland's 4x400m relay team conceded defeat in their efforts to qualify for Beijing. It was a harrowing end to what, for 12 months, had been a valiant struggle against long odds and superior forces. Their failure was as honourable as you could ask for but maybe you don't want to know that. Maybe in your world failure comes in many guises but remains failure nonetheless.

And maybe they shouldn't have thought so big, dared to dream above their lowly station as humble athletes. A year ago two of them lay on their beds in a shabby hotel room in Holland and wondered if there wasn't a way they could channel years of frustration into a common cause. Perhaps that was their first mistake. Irish athletes thinking outside the box has never been a highly encouraged activity.

Back in January, though, the country's fastest 400m runners, including David Gillick, gathered in Santry to put flesh on the idea conceived in Holland that night. They called it Project 400; destination Beijing.

And that morning as a stadium official approached them with the intention of shooing them away as if they were a pack of stray dogs, they glimpsed the magnitude of the challenge they faced. "See," one of them said, bristling with in-your-face anger. "That's how it is. Write that."

The story didn't evolve quite how they imagined, though. There were those who were put out at the sight of a group of athletes doing their own thing but, in the main, Athletics Ireland was helpful and supportive in a way it mightn't always have been. In creating hope for the future and raising the profile of an ailing sport, Project 400 has done Irish athletics a significant service.

What they could never have foreseen was the apparent hostility from certain high-ranking officials in the IAAF, the sport's parent body. International athletics may be critically damaged after years of systematic drug-taking and corruption, yet the activities of a few Irish runners, barely household names in their own towns, seemed of certain importance to top athletics officials. Why this should be so is desperately difficult to fathom.

In terms of qualifying, most of the serious teams began during last year's World Championships on the lightning fast track of Osaka. Only the 16 fastest in the world would make Beijing, the standard distilled from the average of their two best times during the past two seasons. So from the start, having missed Osaka, the Irish team was behind the eight ball.

During the off-season they trained harder than ever, spent more money and approached summer as positive as they could be. Their first race came in Belgium in the second week of June. They ran 3:04.71, slower than they hoped but respectable when you considered that they had to contend with an unfavourable outside draw and the fact that, so early in the season, Gillick would be nowhere near peak form.

Ten days later they went to Tallinn needing better -- 3:04.43 was an improvement but not by enough. A sharp headwind in the home straight conspired against them and left them 0.2 of a second outside the critical top 16. A week later there was a scheduled race in Salamanca in Spain. It would be their last chance and the conditions, almost certainly, would favour them.

Two days before the race, with most of their arrangements in place, they learned the race had been cancelled with little by way of explanation. What made it odd is that Salamanca is the European base of the Cuban team who, like Ireland, were on the margins of qualification. Unlike Ireland, the Cubans didn't need the race, though.

The Central American and Caribbean Championships would be staged in early July. Not only could they get their time there but others, like Ireland and Italy, would be left in the lurch. How convenient.

Facing a desperate situation, the Irish team looked to Lucerne last Wednesday as a last roll of the dice. There was no 400m relay scheduled but the fact that Terry McHugh, the former Irish Olympian, worked for the Swiss federation and was the meet director gave them hope. Other teams wanted to race. Where, they wondered, was the problem?

Enter stage right the IAAF who refused to sanction the race, citing a vague rule about application deadlines. Intrigued, the athletes pored over the rulebook but could not find the relevant quotation.

What's more, they discovered that a 4x400m relay had initially been scheduled for Lucerne. Somewhere along the line it had been jettisoned. Why? They have no idea.

It gets worse. After Salamanca one of the athletes discovered the email address of a high-ranking IAAF official and sent a polite email wondering if anything could be done to help. Instead of help the official replied, not to the athlete, but to Athletics Ireland, ticking the athlete off for having had the temerity to email him. The athlete was mortified.

Then last week Paul McKee, shattered at the unravelling of their dream, criticised the IAAF during an interview with the BBC website. Within an hour, the same official had posted an angry response.

Beyond pursuing their dream with an uncommon vigour, what had such a personable, committed group of athletes done to rattle such a high-ranking cage? They would dearly love to know. In the circumstances, how close they came. On this year's times they are the 15th fastest team in the world despite never racing in favourable conditions. Just ahead of Salamanca, Gillick had shaved a half second off his seasonal best.

That night they would have been primed and the story might have had a different ending. What grates most isn't the not going, though, rather the not knowing, the empty feeling that after all the sacrifices they weren't even allowed to fail on their own terms.

For the seven who were there that January day -- McKee, Gillick, Paddy O'Gorman, Brian Murphy, Gordon Kennedy, Brian Doyle and Dave McCarthy -- there was no fairytale ending, just another sharp dose of reality to go with the many they have received down the years.

And maybe you remain unmoved and think, for all the events that conspired against them, their story still reeks of yet more Irish athletic failure. If so it is you, not them, who is the real loser.

ssport@independent.ie

Eamonn Sweeney is on holiday