Chin up time as London calls
Why would Derval O’Rourke be working as a receptionist at the vet clinic the Dublin Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals have, out in Rathfarnam?
But then some of them do a doubletake. And some of them has asked, “Jesus, are things that bad with the running that you have to work here?”
And at that, she’ll just smile. She always seems to be smiling behind the counter there. When people come in all worked up about their precious pet, she’ll pleasantly reassure them that the vets are top class and will be with them shortly. When people remark that she has a striking resemblance to a certain former world indoor hurdles champion, she’ll good-naturedly quip that they must be joking; she’s much thinner than the real Derval O’Rourke.
And when people assume she is indeed the real thing and are more sympathetic than curious that she’s working there, again she’ll flash that familiar, signature grin. This isn’t work. This is fun. This helps the running be more fun. She volunteered for this.
She started it a couple of months after Daegu. Daegu wasn’t remotely as dispiriting as Beijing but again she hadn’t made it to the business end of a major outdoor championship, pulling out of her semi-final at those world championships last September having injured her calf in the warm-up. When she reviewed the season with her coaches Sean and Terrie Cahill they all agreed that heading into an Olympic year she needed something other than athletics to occupy her vibrant mind and soul.
“You need to have a holistic approach; your life can’t all be about the athletics and the training, so I wanted to do something that I’d love and felt I was in a position where it wasn’t about the money.
“I’m not really motivated by money whereas I love animals and I just feel that eventually when I stop running, it’ll be harder for me to do something like this. It’s only 10 hours a week and it’s really tiny what I do in the whole scheme of things they have up there but it’s so nice to be able to do it. I honestly get more out of it than they do.
“You just learn the most random, interesting things. The other night the last thing I had to do was ring a client who was bringing in a dog who had to be put under general anaesthetic the next day and I had to tell them not to feed the dog after 8pm whereas it seems you can feed a rabbit [in similar circumstances].”
The hardest part is when she learns a dog has to be put down. She’s very attached to her own dog, Berlino, a white fluffy labradoodle that her boyfriend Peter O’Leary, the Olympic-bound sailor, got her a few years back, and she shudders at the prospect that some day Berlino’s time will come too. But, as she’s learned to accept, if an animal reaches that point, either they are sick or they’re very old and have had a good run at it.
After Beijing her own race as a runner seemed run. People thought her career was effectively over. At the time she thought it was a lot worse than that. Her world was over because in her own mind athletics and the Olympics had become her world.
“The main thing I’ve learned from Beijing for London is that you cannot think that one race defines you. It has to be the biggest point of your career and you have to do everything you possibly can to prepare for it but you can’t walk off the track and think the sun is not going to come up tomorrow. I walked off the track in Beijing [after finishing last in her heat] and genuinely thought the sun was not going to come up the next day.
“It took me a few weeks to process it all and realise ‘if that’s how you thought about it after the race, you must have been in that frame of mind before it. You put way too much pressure on yourself’.
“I flew home from Beijing and I thought, ‘Derval, that’s your second Olympics; how much did you enjoy it? What part of it could you cherish?’ And there was nothing. There was absolutely nothing I enjoyed about Beijing. And I just thought, ‘Here you are with one of the best jobs in the world yet the only things you’re focusing on are the all the crappy bits’. “There wasn’t a race in 2008 that I enjoyed. Every race I ran, every time I made a mistake I didn’t look at them as an opportunity to learn and say to myself, ‘when I get this right I’m going to run so quick’. Instead I was destroying myself, going, ‘Another mistake, Derval — why are making all these mistakes?’ I was constantly judging myself, constantly feeling judged.”
Only a couple of years earlier it was oh so different. In 2006 she was hardly known and hardly had a care in the world which probably explained how she finished it being champion of the world in the 60m indoor hurdles. “All the girls who were racing it were looking around ‘What just happened? This is insane. Derval’s the girl that fills a lane, she’s not the girl that wins’.” When she followed it up with a silver in the European outdoors, a lot else came with it — sponsorship, more funding, more attention, and with it, more expectation.
“A lot of problems got on top of me. I had an average year — not a bad year but an average year — in 2007 and was advised by our high performance management to go to England to train for the year, which was a mistake. I completely isolated myself, I didn’t have any friends and my training group were mainly guys.
“The coach [Malcolm Arnold, Colin Jackson’s old mentor] was brilliant but it was either run really fast or die over there and I just started to fall apart. I put so much pressure on myself that I stopped believing in how good I was. I just thought, ‘You’re not good enough to do as well as you want to do’.”
In truth, she didn’t have the energy to do as well as she wanted. She was debilitated by severe bronchitis, a condition brought on from all the physical and psychic energy sapped from her in the lead-up.
After the race and after she’d dealt with the press in the mixed zone, she met up with her coach and closest confidante, Sean Cahill. She couldn’t face taking the bus back to the village and anyone seeing her private torment. Instead the pair of them walked back. It took them over 45 minutes. “Every now and then we’d just sit down on a bench. We hardly said a thing. I cried a lot.”
When the whole Irish team flew out of Beijing a few days later, she stopped off in Frankfurt to visit a friend instead of taking the connection flight to Dublin. Again she didn’t see the point why she’d have to subject herself to the athletes taking all the stick while the boxers took all the laurels. For the next month or so she ate a lot and drank out a lot and felt none the better for it. When she drove to Cahill’s house to see him and his wife Terrie, she was still depressed. The Cahills were sympathetic but what they wouldn’t accept was for O’Rourke to work herself into such a state again.
“One of the main things we agreed upon when we looked back on it all was that they weren’t going to coach me and I wasn’t going to do athletics if I wasn’t going to enjoy my racing again. I had to start looking as major championships as an opportunity to do something great instead of an opportunity to completely mess up. After doing so well in 2006, a fear came into my running. I started to think that if I messed up all I had done, that world indoors gold, that European silver, would all be destroyed.”
After Beijing everything was stripped. Her sponsored car was taken off her, her main sponsors dropped her and half her Sports Council funding was slashed. But in being stripped all those extras, she and Cahill stripped everything back to basics and soon it dawned on her that was just fine. She might have been naked and vulnerable but also strangely and thrillingly liberated.
“In 2008 I guess I felt I had everything to lose but the amazing thing was once I did lose everything it didn’t really bother me as much as I thought it would. I had been too worried about failing and how I’d look in the eyes of all these people that were supporting me but I then realised at the end of the day I didn’t take up running for anyone else but me. The reason I ran as a kid was because I loved it and it was so much fun.”
As a kid she loved running fast. She loved being known to be fast. She grew up in Douglas as something of a tomboy and thrived on being one of the first picked in games of rounders, where her speed would blitz boys older than her.
It wasn’t until she was 13 and she finished fourth in the UK and Irish U15 championships in Birmingham that she discovered there were female peers that could run faster than her, a fact that didn’t sit well with her at all. That aside, she had a very happy and balanced adolescence in Cork: being coached by brilliant mentors in Leevale, having a laugh with her friends in Christ The King, successfully and sometimes unsuccessfully trying to sneak in to Gorby’s and Sir Henry’s. The problem was that it was all probably too comfortable, or at least it would be too comfortable if she remained in her hometown for college.
“I’d say in my whole athletics career leaving Cork for Dublin at 19 was the toughest decision. I had amazing friends and all of them stayed in Cork and they couldn’t believe I wasn’t. If I stayed in Cork, I’d have a scholarship, I’d still have mum’s cooking, I’d still have all my friends but in Dublin there was a really good training group. A lot of them qualified for the Sydney Olympics and I wanted to qualify for Athens so I went to Dublin.
“It was a bit of a risk because if I didn’t run well I’d lose my scholarship, so there was a financial risk there as well but I needed to toughen up a bit. If you’re going to do athletics at an elite level you’re going to race people who’ve come from a lot tougher conditions than you have so it was the least I had to do.”
Her first day on campus in UCD she didn’t know a single person. Those she introduced herself to all thought she was a culchie, regardless of how urban Douglas or Cork was. In Cork her mother used to cook every meal and make her bed for her.
“I was spoiled rotten at home by mum. I didn’t know how to cook. I put on about a stone in first year in college. I still ran a personal best the next year but that was probably out of pure spite after my coach told me I was fat. At the end of the year I said, ‘imagine how fast you’d be if you were to lose that stone?’ I had been eating chips and beans and sausages for €2, being a typical student. I thought you could be a normal person and run fast but that’s not how it works.”
She appreciates the need for some normality. It’s why she went back to do a masters after Beijing, just to bring a bit more equilibrium to her life than the miserable, Spartan-like existence she’d lived in Bath in the lead up to those 2008 Olympics. That holistic approach works for her. In the summer of 2009 she entered the world championships in Berlin ranked 23rd in the world, even after winning bronze in the European indoors. After Beijing few gave her a chance of reaching the final in Berlin. Even her boyfriend Peter doubted she’d make the final and the top five, saying if she somehow did, he’d get her that pet dog she was wanting. She finished fourth, breaking another Irish record. And that’s how she got Berlino and how Berlino got his name.
She feels she was born for the major championships. She knows she’s not good enough to consistently finish in the medal positions on the circuit but come championship she believes she can make finals, pull of personal bests, break Irish records, even medal, because on championship the pressure notches up and opponents have a tendency to knock some of those hurdles down. If she’s right, she’ll nail all of them, and by a process of elimination she’ll be there or thereabouts.
“Being in a championship final is like someone has turned around and said ‘Listen, the biggest VIP party in the world is going on right now; eight people invited. You’re in’. It’s unbelievable fun. Of course you’re nervous, but everybody gets nervous. It’s just that I handle my nerves quite well. I find what really helps reduce the anxiety levels is the day before a championship race I’ll write down my plan with Sean for the next day, from what time I’m going to wake up at to what time the race is at and even maybe the time I feel I’m going to run it in.”
If there’s two hours between breakfast and lunch, she might nap or watch a DVD. The day of a championship, she might nap for 90 minutes. She’ll usually watch something light, either a children’s DVD like Monsters Inc or a rom-com. She’ll write down what bus she’s going to take to the stadium. On that bus she’s usually with Sean. Sometimes they’ll have the banter. Sometimes she’ll just put the iPod on, depending on whether or not she wants to engage with an opponent on the same bus.
The iPod is precious to her. It’ll be on throughout her warmup. She’ll listen to some Eminem, Jay-Z, some Britney, some Drake. She’s more lyrical than tempo-driven. The last song before she enters the callroom is Kanye West’s Jesus Walks because it has the line ‘The only thing that I pray is that my feet don’t fail me now’.
At that point she’s pretty sure her feet won’t fail her then, or that her nerve will either.
She’s seen the mind games in there, and she’ll only engage them on her terms. She’s had opponents raise the matter to her of her being drawn in lane one or eight, and every time she bats it out of the room. “Yeah, that’s cool with me.”
Still 10 hurdles, still all straight; what’s there not to like? Sometimes she’ll admit she’s played something like that with the odd rival. But for the most part, they’re not rivals, they’re colleagues as much as competitors. If she catches the eye of one of the other girls whom she might have had dinner with two weeks ago, they might comment on the talk there’s a bit of headwind out there. Harmless, civil stuff.
An odd one was before the 2006 European outdoors in Gothenburg. Susanna Kallur of Sweden was the favourite and in the callroom she turned to O’Rourke and confided: “I’m nervous.”
O’Rourke looked at her and her watch: “Susanna, in 20 minutes it’ll all be said and done and we’ll all be fine. Don’t worry.” Kallur, having been duly reassured, smiled, nodded and softly wished O’Rourke good luck. 20 minutes later in an epic race O’Rourke finished second. Kallur finished first. O’Rourke is known for her feistiness and competitiveness but she doesn’t regret showing that bit of humanity.
“At the end of the day she knew that I was one of the very few people in the world that understood how nerve wracking that was for her, with all those Swedish people waiting outside. Once we walked out and went our separate ways I tried to destroy her in the race. I wanted to kill her.”
She won’t be out to pursue that European gold this summer. It’s too close to the Olympics. Everything is geared towards London but the difference this time is she intends to enjoy as much of the leadup as she can and do as much as she can on her own terms.
She accepts there are certain things she has to do that aren’t always the most pleasant. Last Tuesday morning at 7.30 her doorbell rang to be greeted by another couple of strangers to take a drug test. That’s about the 15th time in the last year alone she’s been tested. Are other people in other countries tested as often? She has her doubts. But she’s ultimately fine with it because she has no doubts she’s clean while she has her doubts about one or two of her competitors.
“It was never an option [or temptation] for me. Never! I can’t run 12.2. I can’t run 12.3 either. I have an outside shot of running 12.4 and if you run that you’re going to be there or thereabouts.
“I’m not arrogant but I feel I’m good enough to run that time and that it’s very hard to beat me even if you’re on drugs. I don’t think I’m good enough every day of the year but I think I’m good enough in one day of the year that, no matter what you take that, I will keep it together.”
To know Derval O’Rourke is to know she’s her own woman and to like her for that very fact. After Beijing she makes no apologies for doing things her way and the fact she’s heard little enough from the association’s high performance unit is fine with her; it won’t impact upon her performance.
She plans to make a little trip over to London in May to familiarise herself with her surroundings. Then she’ll go over proper two nights before her first race. In her own time, on her own terms.
“I know from experience that it doesn’t suit me to be there very long before my race. I’ll be at home, cooking my own meals, going to Santry, training with my group and my friends.
“For Beijing we were out on our holding camp for three weeks. I hate holding camps. I never train with everyone else on the Irish team the rest of the year, it’s an individual sport, so why would I want to spend three weeks knowing if the walkers are injured or what mileage the distance runners have clocked up?
“I get a buzz in being in my normal environment. Ailish McSweeney the sprinter is a good friend of mine; Ian McDonald [the sprint hurdler] is like a brother to me; Danny Kavanagh makes me laugh all the time as well. They’re the people I want to be around in the lead up to a championship. Everyone takes themselves very seriously in a holding camp.
“I don’t need that intensity or to be looking around at who’s eating what or thinking, ‘God, that person just had some chocolate. Who’s going to choke? Who’s not going to choke?’”
She still has her tough days. The season started up the week before last and she was disappointed with the times she ran in Vienna and Linz, to the point she told Peter when he rang that she didn’t want to talk about it that night. But for the most part she’s treasuring all this.
Tomorrow she goes to Belfast for the Woodies DIY Indoor National Championships. She’ll again be working on a technical emphasis Sean has her working on, to be leaning in and running over the hurdles that bit more. As the season goes on the more she’ll get it right, the quicker she’ll go. All the while she’s embracing every moment.
Now aged 31, she knows she won’t still be competing by Rio but she’ll keep competing after London. She’s enjoying it all too much to quit this year.
“When I walked away from Beijing I didn’t know whether I’d make it to London. I didn’t know did I want to be doing it anymore. But there hasn’t been a day since I sat down with Sean and Terrie after Beijing that I haven’t enjoyed training. I’m just thinking, ‘You have absolutely nothing to lose and everything to gain’.
“From an Irish perspective, Katie Taylor is our big hope. It isn’t me. In 2008 maybe I was in the spotlight, not to that extent, but now I feel this is bonus territory. I’m glad I’m not the one going in with all that hype. I’ve got nothing to lose. I’ve had two Olympics that didn’t go the way that I wanted them to go [in Athens food poisoning prevented her getting past her first heat]. London can never be worse than them.
“In my head there is a big gap in my athletic CV and that is I have not gone to an Olympic Games and run an Irish record. I want to fix it and I have an opportunity to fix it. I’ve qualified. I’m on the plane. I have this opportunity in August to fix it. And if I don’t fix it, it will be hard but it won’t be as hard as Beijing. I will still have four major championship medals. And the sun will still come up the next day.”
