Gillick digging deep for more gold

DAVID GILLICK raced into history when he won the 400m title at the European indoor championships.

Never before had Ireland won two gold medals in a single day at a major championships, and one had to go back to the 1932 Olympics and Bob Tisdall’s 400m hurdles victory for a gold medal in a sprint event.

Now the 21-year-old Dubliner wants a quick double and he will be the gold medal favourite at next summer’s European under-23 championships in Germany.

He also has the world student games in Turkey to come, but the big target will be qualification for the IAAF world championships in Helsinki.

“It is going to be a pretty busy summer for me,” he admitted yesterday as he paraded his gold medal in Madrid.

“I think about that lap of honour with everyone cheering and clapping and it makes me want to do it all over again. It is the stuff you dream about as a kid. This has given me the biggest boost of my career.

“I can go to the European under-23 championships now and grab a gold. It will be a busy season all right.”

The young Dubliner has always been busy. As a youth he played Gaelic football and soccer while winning plenty of athletics honours as a 10 to 12-year-old. It was not until he won the Irish schools 400m hurdles title as a 17-year-old with St Benilda’s that he got to thinking seriously about athletics. The following year he won the 400m flat.

He was fit from football: “I was playing really good at the time and we were training a lot,” he recalled. “But what changed everything for me was when I went to the world junior championships in Jamaica as part of the 4x400m relay team. The whole atmosphere was just gripping.”

From then on he gave his total attention to athletics. With Dundrum/South Dublin athletic club he had been associated with Lucy Moore, who has been involved in his coaching for the past eight years.

These days she still looks after his strength and technique, while his coach is astute Glaswegian Jim Kidd, who mapped out Saturday night’s stunning victory over red-hot Spaniard David Canal, who succumbed to Gillick’s powerful finish that claimed him victory in 46.30.

Gillick was behind at the end of the first lap after Canal took them through in a blistering 21.74 secs, with Russian Dmitriy Forshev battling for the inside. Then the contributions of his coach and trainer came into play.

Kidd had told him not to panic in that situation, to let them battle and bide his time. He found the opening and took his chance.

“I had the whole track in front of me. I knew I was going to win when I came into the finishing straight,” he recalled.

He was reaping the reward of endless hours on cold winter nights in Belfield and those gym sessions at 7am, the only time he can get a free run at the weights before the crowds.

Both Kidd and Moore agree he is easy to coach; he listens and does what he is told. Gillick has made the effort, not for himself but on behalf of Irish athletics, and yesterday he hoped that the powers that be would respond in kind. He currently gets a developmental grant of €4,600 but that should jump to world class when the new grants are announced.

“But it is not just me,” he said. “The Sports Council should be looking at grassroots - that’s where the talent has to be nurtured. You reap only what you sow. I mean, I was running world class before I came here but if I bombed out in the final - just one race - I would not get a world class grant.

“And it is time we took a look at facilities. People are blue in the face trying to get things built but nothing has happened. Yet we came out here with 16 athletes and we will leave with two gold medals. That’s phenomenal. You can only imagine what we could do if we had facilities.”