Sonia O'Sullivan picks her favourite books, sports documentaries and commentators
Sonia O'Sullivan. Picture: Brendan Moran/Sportsfile
Sonia O’Sullivan, 51, grew up in Cobh, Co Cork. She is a former world champion, Olympic medallist and one of Ireland’s greatest athletes. She currently lives in Melbourne, Australia, working as an athletics consultant and broadcaster.
Generally, I went to my grandparents’ house on a Saturday night growing up in Cobh. On Saturday night, I could stay up late watching television, but the payback was that I had to get up the next morning for 7.30 mass with my grandmother.
After mass, we would go into the newspaper shop to get the papers; afterwards I would run back up to her house with the papers, which was all up hill. We would cook the breakfast then, a big fry-up, the works. I loved fried bread! It was an introduction to one of the things I love, which is cooking and cookbooks.
I do feel like in your house you have to have books. There's a warmth to them – they fill a space and add so much colour and character to any room. I have loads of cookbooks – they're such lovely books, and as much as you can look things up on the Internet so easily these days I always find it's so nice to be able to pull out a cookbook.
I can tell the recipes that I use the most because the book opens up exactly at the recipe I’m looking for, possibly because there’s stuff I’ve dropped which has stuck on the page! One of my favourites would be Neven Maguire. I have all of his cookbooks.
I found The Boys in the Boat by Daniel James Brown very insightful. It’s about the US rowing team from the 1936 Olympics. The team for that Berlin Olympics was based out of the University of Washington in Seattle. I have a connection with the university because my daughter goes there.
I always think you connect more with a book when you can relate to it – if it’s set somewhere you know. You become a bit more involved in it. It’s like you’re living the book. What was amazing in the book was the description of the weather they had to endure in winter. It was horrendous. The climate has changed since the 1930s. The winters are nowhere near as harsh as they used to be.
Another book I really enjoyed was Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand, the author of Seabiscuit. It’s about this guy, Louis Zamperini, who was an Olympic runner. He also fought in the Second World War and survived several Japanese prisoner-of-war camps. It’s the kind of book when you get into it, you know you don't want to do anything else but read it.
The hardships Louis Zamperini had to go through were unbelievable. His resilience – he was never going to be defeated. He never gave up. I suppose when I read about stuff like that, I see things in myself that I can relate to. I can become obsessed with a book because I want to see how did this person get through all this. It’s about seeing beyond where you find yourself now.
Telling yourself: I'm going to get through this, and I'll be out the other side. Then we’ll get back to normal again. For this past year, lots of people have been calling on their resilience, knowing we've got to ride this wave here and get through it. It may not be physical torture, but it’s mental torture. I find the tests that people have to go through to – just to prove themselves, to survive – fascinating.
Jimmy Magee was an unbelievable commentator. It was the colour in his voice. He commentated like he was talking to somebody who wasn’t watching the event. He had a gift for describing and telling a story. He wanted people to win and to be successful. At the same time, he was fair in his commentary. He loved the sport for what it was.
You have to love it to be able to talk about it in such a passionate way and to get other people to enjoy it as much as you do. I’ll always remember when John Treacy won a silver in the 1984 Olympics in LA, Jimmy reeled off all the previous Irish athletes who had won Olympic medals as he was running his final lap.
I loved The Last Dance documentary about Michael Jordan. I liked that he did it when he was finished competing so he was reflecting on his life and career from a distance. It also got the interpretation of what other people saw in him that he didn't see himself.
As an athlete, you can be so driven and motivated in what you're doing that you don't see these character traits in yourself. When people are so great and so dominant in their sport, people notice these things, but they're afraid to say anything. There’s certain times when you need to be told things.
Sure, he could have been a bit nicer, but maybe you need to be like that to be great. He didn't want to agree with everybody all the time. He needed to almost create conflict in his mind, an anger in himself, to be able to go out there and fight more on the court.
Michael Jordan was great at blocking out distractions. I found myself that I learned to ignore anything negative that might impact on me; I was good at that. There could be little things that could bother me or annoy me, but as soon as I stepped on the track I could block all that out.
Like if I was having a disagreement with somebody, there would come a point in the day where I told myself: I’ve got to focus on this race now. Nothing else is important. It was like I could erase everything else that was going on around me and turn up and be the best athlete I could be.
I met Jimmy Magee one time in Dublin airport around 2004. He was on the way to do some presentation to Kelly Holmes. He said to me: “They’re after giving me this thing to give to her. I don't know what it is, but it's broken. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with this now.” He started shaking it and all this glass was rattling around inside it.
So he went to London and went on the stage and did an imaginary presentation. He said the amazing thing was that Kelly Holmes played along and took the imaginary award off him.
