Sonia still on track for Athens
Dr Istvan Balyi, who was in Dublin yesterday to promote the seventh National Coaching Forum to be held at the NCTC over the coming weekend said to be held at the NCTC over the coming weekend said media following Saturday night's disappointment in the final of the 5,000m at the world championships in Paris.
"She was tough enough not to fake an injury or anything like that," he said.
"The Chinese sign for catastrophe comes in two parts - disaster and opportunity - and the opportunity is there for her to move forward.
"Age wise she is OK. She will be 34 and that is a good age, particularly for 10,000m, and she can learn from what happened in Paris leading up to Athens.
"On Sunday I had three hours to read the papers while I waited for my flight to Dublin and she deserved much better than what I read."
Dr Pat Duffy, Director of the NCTC, recalled how, after her disastrous Atlanta Olympics, she came back, regrouped and went on to win double gold medals at the world cross-country championships and at the European track and field championships in 1998.
"In a forum like this we are preaching to the converted but I think there is a responsibility to work with the media, to help them understand the long term athlete development programme, because if all we are doing is looking at the results today, and we don't understand the big picture, we are in great danger of losing the plot.
"I think there is a big job to be done before Athens, with the Olympic Council and the Sports Council, to define our expectations.
"Lets be very, very clear on what our performance expectations are and it should be based on an analysis of every single athlete who is going there their training age, their training stage, what their previous performances have been and what can we reasonably expect.
"And it should be remembered that some athletes are going to Athens as part of a five year plan and not a one year plan. Take the rowing four for example. In the world championships we got a boat into the final. The oldest person in the boat was 24 and they qualified for the world championships."
This weekend more than 500 delegates drawn from national governing bodies, coaches, players and athletes will attend the three-day forum at the NCTC.
The theme for this year's forum is 'Building Pathways in Irish Sport' which will cover both early-specialisation and late-specialisation sports. For the first category this includes learning to train, training to train, training to compete, training to win and retirement/retainment.
"What we will be saying to the sports bodies is let's be clear about the phases, let's identify the phases that kids need to pass through," Dr Paddy Duffy said.
Over the weekend Istvan Balyi will deal with the 'training to train' phase and then, in another session, 'peaking and tapering for top performance', while several leading coaches will contribute to the various workshops and then Ken Doherty, Sam Lynch, Valerie Vaughan and John Fulham will present their views from the front line.
Meanwhile, hopes of staging the European cross-country championships at Cork Racecourse in 2005 were fading last night with news that the Government funding was falling far short of what was requirements.
If the decision is made not to go ahead with the application for the championships the deadline is September 19 it will come as a huge embarrassment for the AAI as it is understood there was almost total agreement within the EAA to grant the event to Ireland.
The AAI was not commenting on the matter until such time as they received official notification from the Minister for Arts, Tourism and Sport on the funding but International Secretary, Liam Hennessy, admitted they would be embarrassed if they are forced to pull out of the race to stage the championships when the September 19 deadline comes.
"It is quite true to say that our package was very well received by the EAA and we were very confident of getting the championships in 2005," he said.
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