No Ordinary Fool

Last time out, this mini-series celebrating powerful moments of drama in Olympics track & field finals recalled the shock defeat of Noureddine Morceli in the 1,500 metres final of 1992. As an Irishman, this next story of disappointment cuts a lot closer to the bone. Yes, it is the sad tale of Sonia O’Sullivan and the women’s 5,000 metres final of 1996.

O’Sullivan, in her prime, was an outstanding athlete. She announced herself on the world stage with a silver medal in the 1993 World Championships in the 1,500 metres, having notoriously been beaten into fourth in the 3,000 metres by three little-known Chinese athletes all fuelled up on coach Ma Junren’s magic diet of turtle soup and dried caterpillars. A year later, she would become the European 3,000 metres champion, before an overwhelmingly dominant 2005 season was crowned by victory in the inaugural women’s 5,000 metres World Championship.

The following outdoor season continued O’Sullivan’s run of impressive victories, although the fast times of the previous season were not as free-flowing as the previous year. Most put this down the fact that she was peaking for the Olympics. Indeed, the Cork athlete was gunning for both the 1,500 metres and 5,000 metres titles, so it was important to still have plenty of bounce in the stride come late July.

Atlanta 1996

Qualification for the 5,000 metre final proved a routine exercise and O’Sullivan went to the line as a clear and worthy favourite. My recollection of that night begins with a remark that I made before the race of how unusually nervous she looked. Normally, O’Sullivan would be so deep in concentration that her face was expressionless. Here, though, you could see anxiety etched across it.

The race went off at a decent trot, but no one was really willing to take it out for real. Accordingly, around they went over the initial laps, with O’Sullivan holding a satisfactory position to be able to follow any attempt by another athlete to break away. Then, just as the race began to reach a point where someone might seriously ponder an early attack for the finish line, O’Sullivan started to drift back through the pack and ultimately became detached from it.

A sense of disbelief is all that I can remember of that moment. Had she taken a minor stumble when off camera? There was surely time to mount a recovery… But, no, there was clearly something wrong, as her sweat-drenched figure fell further and further behind the leading group. The moment was gone and she knew it, eventually taking the opportunity to run off the track and down the tunnel.

All sorts of attempts to explain what had happened would follow. Sonia had endured a painful bout of stomach cramps was one. She was mentally burned out from over-training went another. She was distraught and distracted by being made to change her kit publicly in the tunnel by the Irish team manager due to some sponsor’s branding problem went a more lurid one. Of course, the talking heads, armed with the mighty sword of hindsight, had all feared that this could happen. Tales of her gruelling training sessions were minutely dissected. Heads were called for. Someone or something needed to be blamed.

However, as her father famously pointed out in the immediate aftermath of what had happened, nobody had died. It was just a race.

Down But Not Out

Nevertheless, something unquestionably had died inside of O’Sullivan that night. Her aura of invincibility had been smashed and her raw hunger for success had lost its razor sharp edge. My own guess is that she had sacrificed so much to win that gold medal in 1996, that she simply could not summon the strength and stoic determination of Sisyphus to push the great rock right back up to the very pinnacle once more. This did not stop her trying though - far from it - and further fine success would follow.

In 1998, O’Sullivan won over both the long and short distances at the World Cross Country Championships, as well as claiming a superb gold medal double over 5,000 and 10,000 metres respectively in the European Championships later that year. Sadly, the Olympic gold medal would again elude her in Sydney in 2000, but she did win a silver medal in a thrilling narrow defeat to the in-form athlete of the day Gabriela Szabo. Two more silver medals would follow then in the 2002 European Championships.

All in all, her career tally represented a superb haul! Yet, unlike the tales of Morceli and Coe, that precious Olympic gold medal did elude the finest middle-to-long distance female athlete of her generation. However, therein lies the terrible beauty of the Olympics - so few chances, so many pitfalls.