Gillick believes he can go faster

DAVID GILLICK made the move that would take his career to a new level when he set off to join coach Nick Dakin at Loughborough.

It was a brave move but it took the 23 year old Dubliner to the gold medal podium for a second time at the European indoor championships in Birmingham at the weekend.

Dakin is one of the most respected coaches in the world and has been the British national 400 metres hurdles events coach since 2001.

Yesterday he reflected on Gillick’s sensational performance, insisting that he was not surprised. Gillick had become only the second man in history to retain the European indoor 400m title, set a new Irish record and posted his A standard for both this year’s world outdoor championships in Osaka and next year’s Olympic Games.

“I knew he was capable of it,” Dakin said. “His 45.91 from last month was definite proof of that and unless that happened to be just an exceptional one-off time you can usually find a little more in a competition.

“I was very pleased with his performance and the way he executed it over the three races. He dealt with the final particularly well, because the German Bastian Swillims had looked good in the first two rounds.”

He said he was happy how well he was transferring his training form to competition form.

Gillick revealed it was only after a disastrous performance in the semi-finals of the 400m at the European outdoor championships in Gothenburg last year that he started looking around for options.

“Well I know he had been looking at number of options in terms of where he might base himself at this stage of his career,” Dakin said. “I suppose he realised that Loughborough does have a good reputation for its athletics, but more importantly the very good training environment that we have here would allow him to elevate the consistency and quality of what he was doing before.

“From my own point of view I’d seen him run the English indoor championships in 2005, when he made a bit of a breakthrough to win there. Obviously I was aware he had gone on to win in Madrid after that, and I met him again in Geneva last summer, when I had some athletes over there.

“So I was definitely aware he was a talented runner, who probably wasn’t quite converting that to performances outdoors. Based on his indoor running I don’t think he was doing everything he was capable of outdoors.”

He said Gillick was a very strong athlete and that innate strength was the hallmark of his character.

“There are certainly some 400 metre runners out there who are quicker than him in terms of pure speed,” he said. “But he’s got strengths in all areas, like very good endurance capacity. I don’t think we’ll see him dropping down to 200 metres or moving up to 800 metres. I think he’s smack bang where he wants to be event wise.”

Gillick, having achieved most of his goals for the year over the past weekend, now feels he can go sub-45.

“But that’s not the ultimate goal,” Dakin said. “More his goal for the year and I’d like to think he will do it, as long as he gets back into some hard training, as we’re only starting his campaign.

At the end of the month Nick Dakin will take his squad to Los Angeles the city that is regarded by many as the spiritual home of 400m running.

“That’s one of our regular training trips, for four weeks,” he said. “It’s not massively intense and we still won’t be getting into the true speed work just yet. It’s still more speed endurance we’re looking at right now.”