Gillick: All in good time

David Gillick remains unfazed by the fact he has yet to qualify for the Olympic Games men’s 400m and revealed there may be mere weeks to spare before he achieves the required ‘A’ time.

The two-time European Indoor champion is making up for lost time, having spent most of 2011 chasing his tail after an injury-ravaged start to the season and what turned out to be an ill-advised relocation from England to Florida.

Yet a tanned and relaxed Gillick, who turned up at Ringsend’s Sportsco complex yesterday to mark the 150-days-to-go marker, and detail his to-do list between now and the global extravaganza in late-July.

“Obviously I don’t have myqualifying time but I think it would be foolish for any athlete to sit back and go ‘well I have my time’,” he explained. “I’d much prefer to be running the time in the year of the Olympics rather than the year before.

“If it was a case that I was running 44 seconds [plus] in 2011 and I was running 46 in 2012, I wouldn’t want to go to London because you’re not performing.”

The Dubliner reinforced his point by name-checking Britain’s Martyn Rooney and US pair Jeremy Wariner and LaShawn Merritt, all of whom have still to book their places at the festival via their own national trials.

Gillick spent most of Januarytraining in South Africa and leaves Loughborough in England, where he has returned to set up camp, for Los Angeles in late March and another block of pre-season training as well as a handful of lead-in races.

After that, it is back to Europe for the summer circuit.

Chief among the staging posts between now and London will be the European Athletics Championships in late June but Gillick will be making for Helsinki with definitive goals that do not necessarily include a place on the podium.

“I’m looking at the opportunity to put three rounds back-to-back which we don’t have a chance to do at our own national championships and which other nations do. That would stand me in great stead — in thestadium, the crowd and the pressure.”

Realisation dawned during thewinter he had no place for the indoor season but he is “happy with where I am” and believes he is on the way to returning to the form which got him sixth in the world finals in 2009.

But much as he would love to rattle off that ‘A’ time in one of those warm-up races in America, he knows he has to start by blowing away the cobwebs and start recording mid to low 45-second times by mid-June.

Should he succeed in earning his laminated pass for a second straight Games, he will be part of an Irish athletics team that has diversifiedhugely since the days of not-so-yore when middle-distance runners formed the bulk of the posse. He puts that down to the efforts of the athletes themselves rather than the authorities but believes the systems are finally being put in place. He acknowledges the worth of his own annual grant from the Irish Sports Council.

The decision earlier this month to award Gillick €40,000 in funding when more recent high-achievers such as Fionnuala Britton and Deirdre Ryan received half that amount has been criticised but his injury is proof of a need for flexibility.

The Sports Council is in the midst of a root and branch examination of its carding scheme with a report expected some time in June but everyone will suffer cuts from 2013, regardless of achievements or fitness.

With the Government and ISC already serving notice of a slash to the high-performance purse in the next Olympic cycle, the imperative for athletes like Gillick to perform in London and minimise that financial hit is imperative going forward.

“I have to perform this year. If I don’t perform this year I’ll get zero next year and I’ll fully respect that.

“That’s the way it has to be but I feel very privileged to have that sort of backing, particularly in Olympic year.”