Athletics:Joanne Cuddihy missed out on an unlikely place in the Olympic women's 400m final despite a vast improvement on her performance in the heats yesterday.
The Kilkenny woman's time of 51.88 seconds was not a personal best and she wasn't especially pleased with it, but the manner in which she ran her race from lane one to come fifth gave her the most satisfaction.
After running 52.09 yesterday, Cuddihy feared she would not make the semis because of going out too hard at the start and falling away in the closing half of the race. There were no such problems today, as she came home behind America winner Sanya Richards-Ross.
"It was always going to be a massively outside shot to get into the final," she told RTÉ. "We talked about game plan and how to run it. Yesterday I was especially down after my race because when you die in the last 30 (metres), it just leaves you with that feeling that you've died!"
"The plan today was to use the stagger to my advantage, to really control the first 200 and it's hard to do that in these circumstances because you have to be quite strong minded, not to just want to go. But I was determined to finish strong and the idea was that other people in the race would be speculating, would be putting all their cards on the table early, because it was an Olympic semi-final and that maybe, just maybe,
they would start to die like I did yesterday and that I could claw back into it.
"Now unfortunately I left myself too much to do and they didn't die as much as hoped. Overall, obviously, I'd have liked to come away with a much faster time but like i said, it was a plan, I did the best I could, and I think it was the right plan to try and get into the final, but obviously it didn't quite work.
The time was "groundbreaking", she said, but after the fear of missing out on qualification after her first heat yesterday, Cuddihy was happy to have had another chance to take in the atmosphere.
"It's an exciting thing to be a part
of. The noise is just phenomenal. Especially, yesterday I had already mentally dealt with going out, so it was just such a thrill to realise that I was wrong and I got a chance to experience it all again. Because otherwise it feels like it's all over before it began."