Winning start for ‘quietly confident’ O’Rourke

DERVAL O’ROURKE, in her characteristic championship fashion, launched her European campaign by winning her first-round heat of the 100m hurdles, beating one of the gold medal favourites, Carolin Nytra (Germany), with consummate ease in a seasonal best time of 12.88 secs.

This evening (7.25pm Irish time) she will face the European leader once again in the semi-finals with the big Turkish revelation, Nevin Yanit, also included in the line-up but she will not be fazed following a performance that had perfection written all over it.

Coming off a well-timed rather than explosive start, she arrived at the first hurdle spot on and, although the second was not quite so good, she was foot perfect and fancy free from there to the line, where she surprised Nytra on the dip.

“The last time I came here I got disqualified so I sat a little bit in the blocks, made sure I heard the whole entire gun before I went,” she said. “But the start was okay, the hurdles were nice. The second hurdle wasn’t great. It was just an average-to-good run. It was not exactly world beating but it was pretty nice.

“It is starting to come together but there are a lot of girls out there who can run 12.8 so you need to be running 12.7 in the semi and then in the final just run like hell.

“I am quietly confident. For a couple weeks I lost my confidence after I fell because it was such a serious fall and it’s only in the past 14 days that I’ve really blocked it out.

“When you are at a championships all those worries disappear. If you fall over, who gives a damn? So long as I can walk off the track tomorrow night having given it everything that’s fine with me.

“I had a pretty tough heat because I didn’t come in here ranked so I ended up running against Carolin (Nytra) in the first round. My season’s just deceptive because of the things that have happened.

“I can take those hits on the circuit. I take risks when I run those races and I don’t think people realise that. I never take more than a day off before races and then I come to a championships and I rest up a lot – do real quality stuff. Some of my races during the season I did nine, 10, 11 runs two days beforehand so then I’d be tired and make mistakes. That’s doesn’t matter because then I feel good here.

“I’d like to think that I have a medal chance but there are other girls in there who are like me – who just target those two days.”

O’Rourke drew Lane 6 for a tough semi-final with Nevin Yanit who won her heat in 12.89, Cindy Roleder (Germany), one of the fastest losers, Lisa Urech (Switzerland) who was second in her heat in 13.03 secs, Carolin Nytra, Joanna Kocielnik (Poland) who ran 13.25 for third in her heat and Olga Samylova (Russia) who was third behind O’Rourke in a pb of 13.06.