‘It’s not over. I’ll keep racing until the legs fall off’

AS HIS fellow competitors headed for the changing rooms, Ireland’s 200m sprinter Paul Hession lingered on the track for a while watching himself on one of the giant screens which hang in this vast Bird’s Nest Stadium.

His actions were not borne out of vanity, or from a facile hope that the video re-runs would produce a different result than the fifth place he had recorded moments earlier.

Denied of an Olympic final spot by millimetres, Hession wasn’t concerned with what could have been. Instead the Athenry man wanted to remember these scenes and the journey that brought him here, and how he mixed it with some of the fastest men in the world.