Final hurdle

FEW Yale economics graduates follow the career path chosen by Dubliner Paul Coghlan when they successfully complete their studies. Certainly, he is in the fast lane, but it is not in the same way as his fellow students, who are aiming to make it big on Wall Street or in investment banking.

Instead he has chosen the even more volatile world of professional athletics. But after a stellar season in 1999, Coghlan has been plagued with a series of debilitating injuries which have upset progress and prevented him fulfilling the promise which his talent so clearly signposted.

However, the 28-year-old from Castleknock, who last Sunday week won his seventh National title in the 110m Hurdles, reckons his enforced absence from the track in recent months may be the key to him achieving a lifetime best performance at the Athens Olympics, 51 weeks from now.

But first things first, and the Paris World Championships where, Coghlan believes, he can re-ignite the fuse which burned so brightly for him three seasons ago.

"Yes, the last year or two haven't been great for me in injury terms," he reveals. "Actually, 1999 was a great year for me and I made some big breakthroughs. But in 2000 I ended up having to have surgery on my groin and I only managed to scrape in at the Olympics down in Sydney, but I did not have a great year. 2001 was my first year fully back and it went quite well. I was quite consistent without having any great breakthroughs and the last year it was looking really promising I had a good indoor season, I was sixth at the European indoor championships and I set my fastest time since 1999.

"After that I decided the body needed a break and I took a good bit of time off this winter skipped the indoors started slowly back into training and actually I haven't had any injury problems this year, but because of the time off, I have struggled a little bit to find my best form and haven't been as sharp as I would have liked to have been.

"It was kind of a two year plan to be honest for this year and the Olympics next year. I'm reasonably happy but I'm not ecstatic with my current form, but I think things had been headed down a dead end. I hope I've taken two steps back to, hopefully, take three or four forward.

"It was definitely a gamble to do what I did and while it is not paying off in the short term, hopefully in the long term it will." Coghlan is not expecting too much from his efforts in Paris, but he thinks he can do himself justice and take another firm step towards Athens.

"I obviously want to do well in the World Championships, but next year is the big one. The funny thing is that the training in the last couple of weeks has really started to go well and while I haven't produced in a race yet what I am capable of, this year still has the potential to be good. But the main thing is to come through it, run as fast a time as I can, try and get the Olympic qualifier under my belt and go into next year with a bit of confidence and remain injury free."Coghlan claims to be something of an accidental athlete, but he reckons that his school coach at Belvedere College in Dublin, Phil Conway, probably had a career mapped out for him long before he even realised it.

"He's a PE teacher at Belvedere and he's one of the great figures of Irish athletics. He is a close friend of mine and a close friend of the family and it was he who encouraged me to get involved. I was never the hardest working athlete as a younger guy, but he sort of kept prodding me along. He encouraged me to go to College in America."

But how did he become a hurdler, specifically? "Well I always had a decent bit of speed and I was well coordinated. It was one of the first things I ever tried in athletics and I just sort of stuck with it after that.

"When I left Belvedere, I went to Yale in America. I was accepted into Yale before I sat the Leaving Certificate. It is an Ivy League school and not a big athletics school at all, but at the same time they do recruit athletes they like to have people who are academically good as well as good at sport and Phil had a connection there, so that's how it came about.

"I studied economics at Yale and I graduated in 98. Two years before I just missed qualification for the 96 Olympics in Atlanta by three-hundredths of a second. In a funny way it was a shock that I'd run so quickly. I was a 14.4 second hurdler the year before and I ran 13.8sec that year and that was a huge breakthrough. Then in 97, I went to my first World Championships in Athens. I qualified on a B standard and went for the experience. In 98 I went to the Europeans. I was still a 13.8sec or 13.9sec hurdler and I didn't get past the first round, but it was all experience.

"That was when I took the big jump. I finished college and decided to make a serious stab at athletics. Most of my class-mates were either heading to Wall Street or financial institutions of one sort or another in Boston and San Francisco or wherever and I was heading down to Atlanta to start training full-time.

"My connection in Atlanta was Susan Smith, the former Irish 400m hurdler. She had gone to Browne, another Ivy League school and she blazed the path ahead of me. She really encouraged me to come down to Atlanta.

"I went down there to work with Lauren Seagrave and Paul Doyle who was his assistant at the time. Lauren is world renowned sprint coach. I was there only a few months and I started to see massive improvements. That was 1999 and that was my breakthrough year really. I broke the Irish indoor 60m hurdles record and outdoors I broke the national record.

Money is always a problem for aspiring athletes and Coghlan has seen more than his fair share of hard times as he tries to crack the top level of his sport, but he's not one to quibble. "Trying to make ends meet is not always easy, but I don't like to play the poor mouth or do the 'complaining athlete' act. At the end of the day we're out there doing what we love and we chose to do it knowing that there's not going to be huge amounts of money in it unless you make the huge breakthroughs and get to the very top."

Coghlan has achieved a lot in terms of Irish athletics, but his aims still centre on the international scene.

"I've six national titles in a row since 1998 and seven in total which isn't a bad record, although it makes me feel quite old because normally I associate people who've won a lot of titles as being well past it. So I'm not that happy really to be shouting about it from the rooftops.

"I'm very much looking forward to Paris. I feel like my form is good, I'm injury-free and training is going well. I haven't quite hit it in the races yet, but I have a lot of confidence I can get it right and I can run some fast times."

So who is going to provide the serious medal threats in Paris?

"Where do I start. It is the World Championships and everyone will be there. I'm sure Allan Johnston will be very hard to beat. He's the reigning champion. Aside from Johnson, there is Terence Tremmel, who is the Olympic silver medallist.

"This year I'm really just worrying about myself and I just want to run as well as I can. It kind of helps because you're not worrying about anyone else and the expectation levels are not out of proportion.

"If I can get a 13.6sec, 13.5sec or a 13.4sec, I'll be happy enough. I'll have a few outings on the circuit after Paris and who knows, I could run well right through to the back end of the year. It would certainly be a huge weight off my mind if I could get an Olympic qualifying time out of the way and any chance I can to do that, I'll give it a shot.

"The plan after that would be to go back to the States, to Atlanta and get stuck in for the winter. This year there will be no time off there's only one goal in mind. I'll be shooting for a strong indoor season and I think if I can do that, it will give me the impetus to get back to my best."

And so, Paris this week begins a serious year-long game plan for Paul Coghlan, the Ivy League boy who may well wow them on Wall Street yet. If he does, however, it will be because of his athletics prowess and not his business acumen.