Sydney proof that failure doesn’t have to be the end
She won it at the Sydney Olympics, her third attempt at Olympic glory. The 2000 Olympic Games will always be one that had a profound affect on me. Most people will remember it for the moment Sonia finally won her medal, but I remember it a different way.
The Irish athletics team at the Sydney Olympics was the largest sent to any Games. I was a member of the sprint relay squad that had failed to qualify for by two-hundredths of a second. Instead of being part of the Olympic team in Sydney I was sitting on a couch in student accommodation in UCD watching on television.
I had spent the summer being a member of a relay squad that was chasing a qualifying time to book our places on the plane to Australia. The team came incredibly close but in a sport that is measured by fractions of a second it wasn’t enough. At the time I was completely heartbroken but now I think that failure led to me being hungrier for track success.
Apart from Sonia there were other people on the team that had high expectations. One of those was James Nolan. James was a distance runner who had genuine reasons for believing he belonged in the Olympic 1500m final. A few months before the Olympics he won a European Indoor medal. To top that off his last race before the Olympics was his fastest ever. All the indications were that something special was going to happen.
James had positioned himself perfectly. He ticked all the boxes to give himself every opportunity. But the Olympic Games is different to every other championship or big race, it can do something to even the most gifted and prepared athlete. Nolan came 25th in the first round. 24 athletes advanced to the semi-final. He had committed his life to the Olympics and it left him one place short of making a semi-final.
It’s been 14 years since that race. He still speaks of it in terms of the hurt and damage it caused him. There was expectation because he won a medal a few months previously, often the public don’t grasp the difficulty in reproducing medal performances. It was something he never underestimated as he knew the magnitude of the Olympics. Speaking now about that performance and the aftermath, James says it’s difficult to find the words for it but he sums it up precisely by saying there was internal damage done to his belief system.
It’s a type of damage I understand. I felt a similar way in the aftermath of the 2008 Olympics. I believe the Olympics can break athletes and some never come back from it. That damage can be too much for some. James did come back from it, he spent two years in limbo and the love of running was hard to find. But he found a way out of the damage that performance in Sydney caused. He considered retiring but instead decided to fly to South Africa and see if he could find the love for it again.
By 2003 James was producing the best athletics of his career. He went on to compete in the Athens Games and race in the semi-final. These days he’s not far from the elite end of the sport through work he does in UCD with the distance athletes and his expertise is used brilliantly as the head of Paralympics athletics.
James wasn’t the only athlete who left Sydney feeling scarred. Karen Shinkins, the 400m sprinter, went to the 2000 Games with similar hopes and ambitions. She had a shot at making a final and, at worst, should have been in the semi-final. Karen had developed a name for herself as being able to compete at her best when the pressure was on. For the first time in her career she didn’t perform when it mattered most. She was knocked out in the first round. It is something she finds hard to talk about without wincing, but it’s a race that would change her life. With that failure came a re-evaluation of what she wanted from the sport. Within a few months Karen had relocated to the US and within 18 months she would hold the fastest time in the world for 400m indoors. She later went on to win a European indoor medal. Karen is still based in America with the world of elite athletics close to home. Her husband Paul Doyle has one of the biggest athlete management companies in the world and she works with him on marketing and athlete management.
Rather than the Sydney Games defining her athletics, Karen, much like James, went on to run great races in the years after the disappointment. Many athletes never come back from Olympic disappointment.
The Sydney Games may not have been the kindest to Karen or James but maybe that’s okay. Without that experience they might not have found a way to be better. That Olympic hardship might have been a necessity to find a way for them to grow into better athletes. Failure can be the biggest learning experience. When the curtain came down on Sydney there were many different outcomes. Sonia had her Olympic fairytale. Karen Shinkins and James Nolan had some wounds to heal. I had a four-year plan to earn a ticket to the Athens Games.
