Home thoughts from abroad

Jimmy Harvey says that Carroll has a temper but it blows over quickly. Generally, he's not an angry young man. He has issues, though. He's had his problems with the artists formerly known as BLE. He complained bitterly about their lack of support in the aftermath of his bronze medal win in Budapest. Back then an accusation that he had feigned sickness to avoid that year's National Championships rankled with him. He explains it all again, how sick he felt, how he told Niall Bruton that he couldn't get off the bus, how Bruton told the BLE man and the BLE man said don't worry, Niall, I'll deal with Carroll and the tone just got worse from there on in.

In May, when he was getting ready to run in Stamford, California, where he would break John Treacy's decades' old 10,000 metres mark, his agent Ray Flynn called with an offer. If Carroll would go from the west coast to Osaka, Japan to run a 5,000 metres, there was $10,000 in it for him. Carroll is at that stage of his career where 10k is still a lot of money. He talked to Jimmy Harvey.

One race? Jimmy shook his head. Carroll never went to Japan.

"That's the way it had to be. I wanted that money, but it didn't fit in with what we've planned for the season. It's too early in the summer for that. But with the BLE or whatever we are called now every year it's the Europa Cup. They want you for that. It comes early, you're not right, you get a letter late, you have to give up a week's training, sometimes you'll end up paying your own fare. And they think if you say you can't compete that you are messing them around."

Then there's the drugs business. "You can't help thinking. You look at the progression of the distance records. I won't name names, but I know athletes who will name others, of doctors, of places they go. I hear about EPO, too much about it for some not to be true. It makes you angry, but you can't run angry. It's a waste of your own energy. " To his amazement and frustration, he has been tested only once this year, Olympic year. That was back when he won the European Indoor 3,000 in Ghent. A tester called to the door once in the spring looking for Mark's girlfriend Amy. Communications in the testing world were apparently so bad that the tester didn't know that Rudolph had told them that she would be competing in the US Indoors championships at the time. The situation provides him with little foundation for confidence.

"To be honest for someone in my position, with a 13:03 for the 5,000 and 7:30 for the 3,000, I've only been tested once this year. I find that unbelievable. I haven't been randomly tested by the IAAF or anyone else. Ask me do they do a good job? I don't think so. There should be a lot more testing for everyone in the top bracket. How can I have confidence that other people are clean when it's so lax in Olympic year? Even at home you would think that with the huge embarrassment the country has been through in the past, somebody would have tested me by now."

Why not go for it, though, why not wise up and speed up, drop the pill, embrace the needle, join the brotherhood, slip through the net, buy a medal?

He is almost at a loss to answer the question. He talks about his past, about Br Dooley, about the place he grew up in, about family, about John Treacy in the mud, about the feeling he had in Monaco last year when he ran the 3,000 metres in 7.30 and remembered hardly any of it so deep, deep in the zone was he. All these things would be polluted and invalidated and betrayed. He speaks about that thing which athletes rarely speak about any more - the thrill of getting the very last out of yourself.

He knows what he'd like. He'd like EPO testing in Sydney. Lots of it.

"Let's do it like cycling. If your afraid of being sued, ban people for health reasons. Take the haemocrit levels when we arrive. If your level is too high you go home. Then let's test us all in the final. Do it the day before and the day after. Do it the day of the final for all I care. If your too high, well sorry you can't run. No clean athlete is going to complain. "I'll tell ya something, boy," he says laughing and shaking his head at the same time, "whoever takes my Irish records away will have to be either really talented and work really hard, or be really talented and take a lot of drugs."

Mark and Mrs Jones. Nothing goin' on

Marion Jones is on the TV. Nike have put her there, trying to get her face known. The gig is this: Marion Jones is a DJ and Billy Paul is singing Me and Mrs Jones. Marion does this stilted rap. Dis is Mrs Jones transmitting. Why are our athletes getting' no love. Maureeece, Michael and Marion . .

Carroll isn't getting enough love either. In truth he doesn't know if his own profile at home is much better than Marion Jones's is in America. The Irish public don't know the context of athletic things. When he won the Wanamaker Mile in February, people stopped him in the street next time he was in Cork. "Kicking some ass over there in the States, boy. Good on ya."

When he ran his 7.30 in Monaco last year it meant nothing to the general public. He knows it. We are a "show us your medals" sporting culture. He could do with an Irish sponsor just now, a big company happy to get behind somebody pushing the envelope of their talent.

Here's the deal on Carroll. Put Henry Rono, Lasse Viren, Ron Clarke, Dave Moorcroft and Carroll in a 5,000 metres race on their best day ever and Carroll wins easily. Put him in the fastest Olympic 5,000 metre final ever run (1984), and he wins with a couple of seconds to spare. Put him in a race with the current bunch of 5,000 metre practitioners, though, and Carroll is losing altitude fast. Two white guys, only one with an unimpeachable drugs record, have been under that 13 minute barrier. Gebrselassie and Komen have been under 12.40. That's like coming home from the moon and finding out that people have been picnicing on Mars.

It'll come down to a race in September. Quarter-of-an-hour in the sun. The right kind of day and the right kind of race and we'll carry Mark Carroll on our shoulders and cover him in laurels. He deserves that. A bad day and we'll say goodbye, get back to us in four years. He deserves better.