Chantal Gibney
Irish freestyle swimmer
Her day starts at 4.0 a.m, when Plant City is still slumbering and guarded by street-light. The air is never cool in Tampa, except in the coffee parlours and restaurants, so she gets to swim outdoors and on clear nights, stars reflect on the surface of the pool, as if the water was showbiz.
The novelty made the ferocious rising time a little bit easier to handle. When Chantal Gibney first began training in the 50 metre pool, it felt like she was attempting to sprint across an ocean. Now, it's the opposite: when she returned to Dublin recently for a brief Christmas reunion with her family, the city pools looked like tanks. She minced them.
It's no ordinary life for a 19-year-old. But when she broke Michelle De Bruin's 50 metres sprint Irish sprint record in 1998 (25.84 seconds) she knew that she owed it to herself to devote time to preparing for Sydney. So she called up her old coach, Peter Banks, in Florida.
Right now, Gibney's life is designed around shaving fractions off her sprint times. She is 0.9 of a second outside the 50 metre Olympic A standard time (25.0 seconds), 1.9 seconds off the 100 metre time (56.0) and under a second beyond the 200 metre point of 200 seconds.
"I'm pretty confident of making the times," she says quietly.
Carol Walsh, her Irish coach, is unequivocal: "I do think she'll make those times. This is someone who has spent so much time in the water since she was 11 and has just worked quietly towards what she wanted to achieve. She has given up a lot - a social life, work, things that are second nature to other girls of her age."
Finance has always been a concern, particularly since Government funding for swimmers was suspended. Although some money has begun to trickle through again, she is mostly reliant on her family and Adidas, who have recently weighed in behind her.
Not that she moans. Over the past few years, when Irish swimming sank to record depths and triggered widespread disillusionment, Gibney just continued to rise early and train. She asks for nothing. "There is a lot of goodwill towards Chantal," says Walsh. "She is a very striking person in terms of her personality and looks and has just remained constant through the ups and downs. There are so many people who want to see her succeed."
Chances are that Chantal Gibney will swim for Ireland in Sydney and won't win any medals. This year's tournament is about consolidation, experience. In the broad picture, Peter Banks and Carol Walsh are thinking in terms of a place on the podium in 2004.
Ciara Sheehy
200 metre sprinter
In Santry, a wet sheen gilds the track and as the coach and athlete converse, breath shoots through the air like steam pistons. These sessions, interminable in midwinter, are gut-wrenching. They can leave her drained and empty, but Ciara Sheehy needs to cut her time if she is to make the A qualifying time for Sydney. She has run the fastest indoor 200 metre time ever by an Irish woman (23.97 seconds) and has hit 23.49 on the outdoor circuit, which is also an Irish senior record. She needs to plane that to 23.20 by the end of July.
"Blink of an eye," she laughs. "I'm hopeful I can do it, but in sprinting terms, it's a sizeable deficit to make up."
Even though she is only 19 she has already established herself as a pressure performer. Last summer, she was in the doldrums, injury-wracked, behind schedule and just feeling glum. She went to the European Junior Championships just to fulfill a fixture.
"I had a feeling that five solid days' work would do her an immeasurable mount of good, that she could catch up and that's what happened," says coach, Jim Kielty.
Sheehy duly eclipsed Michelle Walsh's 21-year-old record and found herself in Seville for the big-time. Hard not to get wide eyed, when you are there at track-side warming up, trying not to feel conspicuous as you watch CJ Hunter shadowing Marion Jones around into the arena. But then she heard a few lone shouts of "Go on Ciara" and she was just another competitor.
"The brilliant thing it is that she was running against girls who sprint 22 seconds flat and she was isolated towards the finish but she ran her own race and ran her second best time of the year," says Kielty.
Ciara Sheehy's athletics life began at the community games in St Jude's. She just went up with her friends and realised she could run after she came home clutching a bundle of golds. Then in Mosney, she took gold in the 100 metres and her folks took her along to West Dublin AC where she met Don Cashman and Jim Kielty.
"It wasn't just an automatic ascension or anything," she says. "There was a time at BLOE juvenile level when I seemed to be getting constant thirds or fourths. Then I found that 200 metres was the right distance and when I was about 16, things started to click."
Sheehy is still fledgling in terms of development. She now lifts serious weights. Training is daily, so she has deferred college and was granted state funding of £3,600 for the year. Early this year, she heads to South Africa and then to Portugal in Easter for warm-weather training. Costs will spiral into five figures and after all that, she may not make Sydney.
"There is no reason Ciara can't cut the times down and make the A time. But even if she doesn't, she should be brought to Sydney with the European Championships in two years in mind. This is our 200 metre record holder," reasons Kielty.
David Jones
Amateur golfer.
So far, the young Derry golfer David Jones has found his American college experience to be all sweetness and pie. After a period of uncertainty and a feeling was going stale, he studied the scholarship pamphlets and went for the Ohio campus where he knew a couple of Irish golfers were already attending. He enrolled to study sports science and management and if he wants to play, he has to maintain a grade average, but he is at heart a golfer and has already begun to accustom himself to the ethic of practice and repetition which is bread and butter to any pro. "It's very full, your day," says Jones. "Three days a week you're up at 6.00 a.m. lifting weights. Designed to just keep you in trim and get more out of your drive. Virtually every serious player is doing that now. Times outside class are spent on the course and at weekends, you are normally caught up in tournaments."
No one in the Jones household had ever held a club in earnest before David. The family lived beside a golf course at Prehen, on the periphery of Derry city, and as a youngster he would jump the wall with his brother Kevin and they would swing and chase for a while between school's end and darkness.
And there is no cute tale of innocent prodigiousness. No, Jones just took one lesson and then played, played, played. "Natural aptitude?", he laughs. "Don't really think the term applies when it comes to golf. " Maybe, but within a couple of years of first lashing a seven iron, he was playing off 24.
And this is just six years ago. His development, within the national schoolboy framework has been one of unerring ascent. Within four years, under the eye of Don Patterson, the former Ulster coach, he began making short work of opponents on courses across the country.
Honours followed. He was on the national side that took the Jack O'Byrne trophy three years ago and then in 1998 was part of the successful Great Britain and Ireland team that defeated the Rest of Europe in Turin in August. That September came his finest moments when he was asked onto the senior national side along with players like Gareth McGimpsey and Paddy Cribben. Then came a bit of a freefall, when he left school and decided to go to Spain for a year to hone his game. "Maybe it was too much golf," he admits. "There are times when you feel as if it takes you over completely. That's why I'm really enjoying the combination of being in college as well. Sometimes you have to get away from the game totally."
But it's hard to do in the States. NCAA golf is pretty big news and Toledo is ranked among the best in the country. And even when they aren't out on the course, the game is everywhere. Jones wants to make golf his life. "I'll definitely spend the next few years here, make sure I get an education behind me."
As soon as he leaves, he wants to turn pro. He has heard all the cautionary tales, about dreamyeyed pro's sleeping in the back of their beat-up cars, eating three square's a day at McDonalds and maybe never getting within 10 shots of a tour card. "It doesn't scare me," he shrugs quietly.
Susan Moran
US college basketball player
For the Tennessee game, tickets were gold dust. Women's basketball in Phili always had a hardcore crowd, but sell-outs? This was fresh. The Lady Vols, the team which had produced Chamique Holdsclaw, the first superstar of US women's basketball, was hot property and that night in November, the locals turned out to see how Joe's girls would do against them. They stomped the ground so hard that the hardwood trembled. It was a rowdy and expectant crowd, a throwback to those aged nights when Dr J ran with the 76ers. Trouble was, St Joseph's did no running that evening. Tennessee burned them for four hoops quicker than butter melts on popcorn and the home coach, Stephanie Gaitley, called time before the thing became a rout. The St Joe's girls sat in the locker-room and soaked up the loss. It was only their second defeat of the year.
"I guess it was a learning experience for us," says Susan Moran, the sophomore forward who led the scoring for St Joseph's that night with 16 points. "As well as winning our division again this year, we have hopes of making it to the `Sweet Sixteen' of the NCAA championships, so you need to play against the top sides in the country. It didn't happen for us that night but you just pick up and move on."
Whatever doubts may have existed about Moran prior to her arrival in the Pennsylvanian college have long since dissipated. In hoop terms, she is a go-to player now. Last year, her first season, she led the team in scoring (14.7 per game) and rebounding (6.5 per game) and was voted the Atlantic 10 and Big 5 division rookie of the year. Moran isn't especially big (5ft 11in), but is a versatile athlete, a big leaper, works until she drops and is always developing as a player. In Ireland, when she used to break schoolday monotony by winning any All-Ireland competition that Sacred Heart, Tullamore, entered, she relied on strength and physique. Now, she mixes power moves with a sweet outside shot.
Moran is the best female basketball player ever to emerge from this country. Reeling off a string of personal statistics is alien to her modest personality and she prefers to steer conversation towards the aims of the St Joseph's teams in general. But the thing is, scouts for the women's NBA are among the faces in the crowd and her stats have drawn them there. "I really don't give it much thought at the moment. Yeah, if the opportunity arose to maybe try out for a pro team, I could be interested. But right now, all that's really in the back of my mind, I'm just thinking about college."
