Not long now until the ruby jubilee of the most magnificently spontaneous sporting commentary in Irish Olympic history. No exaggeration either, because surely you all remember exactly where you were 40 summers ago when Jimmy Magee treated us to this.
“They’re going for silver, they’re going for bronze, and Treacy has moved away from Spedding . . . John Treacy has 100 metres to go . . .
“In the past Ireland has won bronze medals. John Caldwell. Freddie Gilroy. ‘Socks’ Byrne. Jim McCourt. Hugh Russell . . . They’ve won gold. Pat O’Callaghan. Twice. Bob Tisdall. Ron Delany.
“They won silvers with John McNally, Fred Tiedt, Wilkins, Wilkinson, and now for the 13th time, an Irish medal goes to John Treacy. The crowd stand for the Irishman from Villierstown in Waterford. The little man with a great heart . . .”
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Chapeau! It still sounds fantastic now four decades on, eloquently encapsulating all the historical significance of Treacy running into the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, with Britain’s Charlie Spedding on his heels.
At that moment in time, 60 years into our now 100-year history of “official” Olympic participation which began in Paris in 1924, Ireland had indeed won only 12 medals, and in only three sports: athletics, boxing and sailing.
The marathon was the final event of those 1984 Olympics, the stadium crammed with 92,500 spectators.
Treacy’s performance that hot evening was heroic in every sporting sense, not only because it was his first marathon, in arguably the greatest field ever assembled, but also because no one expected him to medal.
Which is also why Magee’s commentary – recalling Ireland’s 12 previous Olympic medal winners in the time it took Treacy to run the final 100 metres – is so perfect: he did realise, about a mile from the finish, Treacy was likely to make the podium unless he collapsed. And yet his astonishing display of sporting memory, delivered with such compelling emotion, put Treacy’s achievement straight into the sporting pantheon where it belongs.
There was also a suitable reminder of it all on Thursday evening when Treacy was invited to the Team Ireland hotel in Blanchardstown to present some of the track and field athletes with their Olympic vest prior to their departure for Paris on Friday morning.
Among them was Thomas Barr, and when Treacy looked him in the eye it was clear they held a special connection. Not just because they both hail from the same land of the Déise, born and raised just over 40 miles apart – Treacy in Villierstown, Barr in Dunmore East.
It’s also because if Treacy knows exactly how life-changing it can be to stand on the Olympic medal podium he also knows what it’s like to just miss out – finishing seventh in the 5,000m in Moscow in 1980, just 1.7 seconds away from bronze (Eamonn Coghlan finished fourth, just 0.8 short of the podium).
Barr endured a similar experience in 2016, when inside the not entirely packed Olympic Stadium in Rio he finished fourth in an absolute flat out final of the 400 metres hurdles – just .05 of a second away from bronze. His time that day of 47.97 seconds remains his lifetime best and would have won Olympic bronze in London 2012 and silver at each of the two Olympics before that.
Yet in the immediate aftermath Barr was positively beaming. “When I saw the time I was ecstatic, because 47 seconds is ridiculous territory,” he said. “Maybe I just didn’t execute the perfect race but I left everything on the track, and I’m thrilled with that.”
Of course there are no medals for fourth – only a quick high-five from the winner, a slap on the back from second and third, and a teasing sense of torment that often lasts at least another four years. Only for Barr that day in Rio also came with the sense his medal chance would come again, sooner if not later.
He was just 24, had just (twice) broken the Irish record, and while Barr did win European bronze behind Norway’s Karsten Warholm in Berlin in 2018, his hurdling luck since then is best described as lousy.
There could also be some sense of wonder, given Rio second-place finisher Boniface Tumuti from Kenya, who ran a national record on 47.78 in an event where Kenya had no tradition, never broke 50 seconds again, disappearing entirely just a few years later.
It doesn’t help that his event has moved on considerably since Rio, Warholm winning the gold medal in Tokyo in 45.94 seconds, Barr just missing that final by one place, clipping a hurdle late on and still running 48.26, the second fastest time of his life.
Barr turns 32 next Wednesday, two days before the opening ceremony in Paris, and although he narrowly missed out on a third Olympics in the 400m hurdles, he is a central part of the mixed 4x400m relay having produced that scorching 44.90 second split on the third leg of Ireland’s gold medal run at the European Championships in Rome last month.
When I asked Barr on Thursday had he any lingering regrets about Rio, he immediately drew that chirpy smile again.
“No, no, and it’s funny, I’ve never looked back at Rio and thought ‘what if?’ I could have had a medal. I’d been injured pretty much all year up until that point, and my expectations went from reaching a final to challenging for a medal.
“What I do look back at Rio and think is ‘what did I do back then?’ or ‘what did I have back then that I haven’t had in the last eight years?’, because I’ve been chasing that 47 seconds since.”
Paris will be special in another way given his partner since shortly after Rio, Kelly McGrory, is part of the squad for the mixed and women’s relays.
Since Treacy’s silver in LA Ireland has won another 22 Olympic medals in six sports: athletics, boxing, sailing, swimming, equestrian, and rowing. Within the Paris team of 133 there are genuine Irish medal hopes in at least eight sports, and if Barr should make it on to the podium as part of that mixed relay imagine that for some magnificently deserving sporting commentary.
