McKillop’s winning recipe

For Michael McKillop, it began with a Nutella sandwich and ended with dessert.

He had been skittish all day. On the Friday night, the 22-year old tossed and turned in the room he shares with Jason Smyth in the Olympic Village before making a break for the living area and it was 1am by the time he felt ready to return to the cot.

When he did he found his roomie lying on his own litter, eyes wide open and still buzzing from his world record run in the T13 100m heat a few hours earlier. Both men knew that was merely an appetiser for the day that was waiting to dawn.

So did everyone else.

When Paralympics Ireland scrolled down through the provisional schedule for these Games 14 months ago and saw Smyth’s 100m final, McKillop’s T37 800m final and Darragh McDonald’s S6 400m freestyle final down for the same day they knew Saturday, September 1 would be special.

Super, even.

McDonald was first out in the Aquataics Centre a little short of six o’clock. McKillop was still buzzing about like a flighty debutante on prom night. Then he made his way to the canteen to smother those butterflies with some sustenance and distraction.

“I was sitting eating my Nutella sandwich before I went out and I seen it come up on the screen,” he said. “And I went, ‘That’s Darragh’s race’ and I ran over to watch it. And for him to win it by that far, like eight seconds or something, that’s incredible.”

Incredible, certainly, but nothing the 18-year old from Gorey didn’t expect of himself. Three weeks earlier, the amputee had sat in the lobby of Bewley’s Airport Hotel in Dublin and all but prophesised the events that came to pass two days ago.

He spoke about his PB of 5:04, how he would aim to take that down to 4:55 and how his main opponent – a 47-year old Swede called Anders Olssen – would probably not prove to be the supreme athlete he was when he triumphed in 2008.

Then he went out and raced 4:55.56 at a sweaty and stuffed 15,000-capacity arena, shaving seven seconds off the personal best he had already lowered by three that morning with his distinctive all-action style and leaving the ageing but still graceful Olsson eight seconds adrift.

The evening’s tone had been set. Take gold. Dominate.

Ninety minutes later, Smyth thundered down the track to lower his world record for the second successive day, this time to 10.46. More than half-a-second separated him from the Cuban silver medallist, Luis Felipe Gutierrez: the blink of an eye to most of us, an eternity in a race of such constrained distance and time.

Half-an-hour into the night and one of the Games’ undoubted superstars was still inching his way through the media mixed zone but not before the watching McKillop had got to him first. “I just said, ‘well, done. I want a bit of that’ because I wasn’t walking into the bedroom (Saturday night) without a gold medal around my neck.”

There was little fear of that. Like Smyth, McKillop was a class above everyone else in the field. A Formula 1 car amidst a fleet of family saloons, just as they were four years before in China. For 380 metres, he contented himself with a perch on the shoulder of Australia’s Brad Scott before deciding it was time to fly solo.

And fly he did, in another world record time of 1:57.22 that would have been chipped further had he not slowed his stride with five of the 800 metres still to cover so that he could luxuriate in the moment in front of his parents and girlfriend and 79,997 other souls. Even with that, Tunisia’s Mohamed Charmi was the first to follow him over the line, four seconds later.

“My dad just said, ‘never in doubt.’ He knew I was the best athlete. I knew I was the best athlete in the field. It’s about executing it. To do it in such a good way and come across the line first is such a great thing and to break a world record is even better.”

It was a remarkable three hours. Surreal. For a short while, the haul even bumped Ireland into the top ten of the medal table and McKillop, who bemoaned the absence of a 1,500m in Beijing and his inability to double up on titles like Smyth did with the100m and 200m, revelled in the opportunity to be the last man at the table.

“Well, everyone likes the dessert better than the main course,” said McKillop who will be expected to gorge on the 1,500m title tonight. “Jason was the main course but even when you’re full, you always have room for dessert. That’s what I was.”