It’s a brutal sport. Most lads won’t get close to doing the work. Then you need the talent. At the very top level of Irish athletics it’s super human, never mind the top world level.
Jerry Kiernan called it out about GAA players not training as hard as they think they do.
You need the talent, the desire, and a flip belt.
Is it to do with people just being hardier years ago? Are there many long standing Irish records?
At one stage I think Sonia O Sullivan held every irish record from 800m to 5000m.
It’s a niche sport so the talent is like morse code. It comes and goes. You get generations of excellence and there was a golden generation. Unlike any other sport there’s an objective comparison - time. If a record lasts that long it’s because it’s a fast time.
Ailish was excellent . A Carrigtwohill native .
Limerick’s Ciara Neville marches on
When will the semis be?
Lavin qualified for the semis yesterday didn’t she?
In about 30 minutes.
Some abs on all of them. I’d say they’d plank for days
Ciara Neville 7th there. 7:37
Same time as earlier. Dunno how that stacks up against her PB.
BBC2 now for Sarah Lavin
Will need something very special to advance
Was she 4th?
The sort of honesty that is sometimes badly lacking in Irish athletics
Seán Tobin finished 11th in the final of the 3000m at the European Indoor Championships in Poland on Sunday evening.
For the Clonmel man - Ireland’s last chance of a medal at the competition - it was a thoroughly unsatisfying result.
“Ah, pretty rough - that was very disappointing,” Tobin told RTÉ following the race.
"It feels embarrassing, being honest.
"Clearly the head wasn’t there. When it went, I didn’t go and my mind was screaming at me to go. I don’t know, I let it go and switched off. That shouldn’t at these sort of levels.
"I felt pretty good coming off yesterday; today I felt pretty good. Still, it just shows our group - (Andrew) Coscoran was seventh and Paul (Robinson) was 10th (in the 1500m) - we’re all good enough to get to a final now but that’s not good enough for us.
“It’s a step in the right direction.”
Never heard of him
Really? He’s been posted on TFK about 3 times today already
Poor lad had a tough life. I’d not judge him too hard
Of all the ways his story could have gone, this one existed on the outer edges of realism.
From a childhood in a “crack den”, hopping from foster home to foster home, to becoming one of the fastest 200-metre sprinters in the world, living and training with an all-time athletics great.
Leon Reid can’t say for sure why he didn’t follow some friends and family into a life of chaos and crime, but he knows this: by the age of six, he knew what he didn’t want to become.
“There would be people downstairs smoking crack or heroin, so it was more, 'I do not want that,’” he says.
“My brother started getting into trouble, getting arrested at an early age and I said, ‘I don’t want that to be me’.”
No one used to wake him up for school. No one cared if he stayed home. Reid still set an alarm and walked the three or four miles there each morning.
The escape hatch from this life came via a Wexford native, Claire Russell, who adopted him when he was 11. His birth mother, Anne-Marie, hailed from Belfast and had struggled with drug addiction for years before passing away in 2016.
During his childhood, Reid spent time in 14 different foster homes in the English midlands. Long before Russell gained the paperwork to make him her son, she showed him a new path.
Time is money mate. I’m only catching up now
He had a way out
That’s really disappointing, saw an interview with him on tv recently and his story was inspiring. Seemed like a really good guy.