The plan was to sneak in with my dad and act like one of the proper running journos. It might have worked too, if only there weren’t so many other chancers like me trying to spoof their way into the elite finish area of the London Marathon.
Accreditation please!
Can it really be 27 years ago this Sunday? Because there is still so much clear recall of my part-fluke and part-fate experience of witnessing Catherina McKiernan winning the 1998 women’s race by almost half a minute. If her London Marathon victory proved a once-in-a-lifetime moment for McKiernan, it still feels the same for most of us also there on the day.
As a fledgling freelancer with a bank account to match, getting to London made little sense financially, but perfect sense spiritually. McKiernan had won the Berlin Marathon the previous September in 2:23:44, the then fastest debut in women’s marathon history. And her very appearance in London marked an unprecedented moment in Irish athletics history: a Cavan woman among the leading favourites to win. Nothing could beat being there, especially not a cheap last-minute flight.
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As it turned out, no one could come near to beating McKiernan, who finished 28 seconds ahead of two previous winners in London – Scotland’s Liz McColgan, and Kenya’s Joyce Chepchumba – in a race that prided itself on bringing together the best marathon runners in the world. The way the so-called marathon majors are going now, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to imagine how any other Irish athlete will ever repeat this feat. Never say never, but who knows?
There’s been a lot of talk and debate lately about who Ireland’s greatest sports person of all time is. We ran our little poll on this fanciful subject last week, and it was no surprise Rory McIlroy got 23 per cent of the responses, still fresh off his Masters win, completing a career Grand Slam earlier this month.
This is a little different from debating the greatest Irish sporting moments, or indeed sporting achievements. Which is where McKiernan’s victory in London in 1998 will always rank so highly in the Irish stakes for me. Not just because of the esteem around the event, and the great modern tradition of the Sunday morning coverage on the BBC. But also because it came at a time when Irish women were still only beginning to scratch the surface of the upper echelons of world sport.
The night before Paula Radcliffe won the 2002 London Marathon, she had a dream about McKiernan, as if some unconscious reminder of how that 1998 victory had made such a critical impression on her. Radcliffe explains this in her foreword to McKiernan’s 2005 autobiography, Running for My Life. Normally, Radcliffe would sleep soundly before any race, yet somehow McKiernan came to mind, whom she’d known since the World Cross Country was staged in Boston in 1992.
That was the day McKiernan made her global breakthrough to finish second in the women’s race, while Radcliffe won the junior women’s title.
“In many ways it inspired me even more to see the way she ran, how close Catherina came to winning the gold medal,” Radcliffe writes. “Even winning the silver medal was really impressive. She was young and yet determined and able to run with the best of them.”
Later in Running for My Life, McKiernan writes about her own influences and motivations ahead of her London Marathon. After going on to win four successive silver medals in the World Cross Country, and helping Ireland to team bronze in 1997, she skipped the event for the first time in 10 years in March of 1998, despite showing excellent form.
So while the event was staged in Morocco, McKiernan was away at altitude training in Albuquerque, New Mexico. It was not an easy decision, especially as McKiernan was preselected for Marrakesh, but London had to take priority.
On the first Saturday morning in Albuquerque, which coincided with the first day of the World Cross Country, McKiernan called home to her mother Kathleen, who gently informed her that Sonia O’Sullivan had just won the gold medal in Marrakesh. That was also the first year of the new long-course and short-course races, and O’Sullivan also came out on the Sunday and won the short-course gold.
“I am not an envious person and I always loved to see Sonia and other Irish athletes win wearing the green, white and gold,” wrote McKiernan. “I’d run the World Cross Country nine times and finished second four times. The first year I decide not to run, Sonia wins ... A part of me was delighted for Sonia, but I knew I had made a huge effort to win that title over the years and had just come up short. I think it was only natural to feel a little upset.”
It was a stunning comeback for O’Sullivan, whose unbeatable form had deserted her in the previous two years. It also reinforced McKiernan’s mindset going into London: “If there was one race in my whole career where I went to the starting line knowing I would win, it was the London Marathon in 1998.”
Despite experiencing an upset stomach at about 15 miles, everything else went perfectly to plan. Unlike my plan to spoof my way into the finish area. Later that evening, at the Tower Hotel where the elite athletes stayed, one of the first people to drop in to congratulate her was O’Sullivan, and straight away McKiernan congratulated her back.
Before the year was out, O’Sullivan won a European Championship 5,000m-10,000m double in Budapest, and McKiernan would also win the Amsterdam Marathon in 2:22:23, which still stands as the Irish record, on the day missing the world record by just 96 seconds.
Which, together, unquestionably, make up some of the greatest Irish sporting achievements, not just in a once-in-lifetime sense, but unlikely to be repeated.
