McSweeney sets sights on Valencia

TWO years ago Ailish McSweeney shared a room with Derval O’Rourke when her Leevale clubmate won the 60m hurdles title at the world indoor championships in Moscow.

Now, after two best-forgotten years, she is hoping they will be sharing again at the World Indoor Championships in Valencia where, if all goes well, O’Rourke will be defending her title.

Those intervening years were something of a disaster for McSweeney, who shared again with O’Rourke at the European outdoor championships in Gothenburg in 2006 and the world indoor champion went on to claim silver in the 100m hurdles while McSweeney was just a shadow of her self.

“I qualified for the 100m but my form was so bad I just ran in the 4x100m,” she said. “Things went downhill from then.”

She struggled to regain her form under coach Jim Kilty but decided to part company with him last year and joined Sean Cahill and his wife Terri (nee Horgan). Cahill is a former international hurdler while Terri is also a former international athlete.

“Jim is a great coach — the best — but things were not going well for me and he had done just about everything,” said McSweeney.

Then the Cahills came along and the relationship developed.

“I felt things beginning to turn,” she said. “I wanted to run fast again.”

And she did. The performance she was looking for came in Luxembourg two weeks ago when she ran 7.41 for 60m and, suddenly, she was thinking about the World Indoor Championships again.

She knows that to get to Valencia she will have to run her personal best of 7.37 at the Odyssey Arena in Belfast tomorrow, as that’s the qualifying standard.

“I know the 7.41 in Luxembourg was just one race,” she said. “But it has restored my confidence and I know I can run fast again.”