LOCKERROOM:Ten years! What a difference the daughters of Sonia have made to our sporting landscape. But the battle is far from won. . .

IN BOUNCE, Mathew Syed’s fascinating study on how champions are made, the author quotes from a simple study done at Yale seven years ago. Even if the study had come up with nothing, the execution of it is amusing to those of us who have trouble with simple addition and subtraction problems.

Anyway, a group of undergraduates were separated and placed into rooms by themselves and asked to work out a maths problem (as I have always suspected of maths problems and would have written down were I there, the problem was in fact insoluble).

Before getting down to work the students were also asked to read a report written by a former Yale maths student called Nathan Jackson. This note was ostensibly to supply info on the maths department but was, in fact, part of the cunning plan.

Jackson had never existed and his report was written by the people conducting the experiment with a specific purpose in mind. In the middle of the report they placed a panel with Jackson’s “biographical” details, including date of birth.

For half the students, Jackson’s birthday was altered in the report to match their own. In other words half of the students read a testimony from a stranger who apparently had the same birthday as they themselves had. They were then asked to get to work on the maths problem.

Incredibly, those students who thought they had the same birthday as Nathan Jackson were significantly more motivated than the other 50 per cent of the study group. They persevered with the problem (which couldn’t be solved) for an average of 65 per cent longer than the non-matched students. When questioned later they were also remarkably more optimistic about maths and their own abilities.

The outcome, when viewed in terms of motivation, was hugely important in analysing the importance for sports people of the need to associate with and be inspired by success.

This information dovetails with one of the book’s central tenets, about the need for 10 years’ hard and worthwhile practice for anybody to become truly world class or exceptional at a sport.

Thus when the Korean golfer Se Ri Pak won the LPGA Championship in 1998 she was the only Korean player on the tour. Ten years later there were 33 Koreans on the Tour. When Anna Kournikova reached the world top 10 in November 2000 she triggered a wave of young Russian tennis talent which surged through the sport a decade later. There are now six Russians ranked in thew world top 20 of women’s tennis. And just two Americans.

The examples are many and convincing and no more relevant than when we note that this week, one of the greatest weeks in the history of Irish women’s participation in sport, was marked by the anniversary 10 years ago on Saturday of Sonia O’Sullivan’s silver medal run in Sydney.

The narrative which led to that epic and wonderful night meant that, oddly for such a competitive woman, the colour of the medal she came away with made no difference. Emotionally we invested as much as she did in a race which was perfection in terms of what athletics has to offer. We had watched Sonia grow up, watched her fall and watched her cry and finally on that night we watched her unravel the last and the best of herself and walk away as a hero.

To be there was to be present at one of the few genuinely awe-inspiring occasions which a career covering sports can provide.

It is hard to imagine the impact which that night must have had on so many girls who watched it. The story of a heroically clean and valiant athlete reaching a climax under the bruised Sydney sky, an example of the joy which sport can give when you get everything out of yourself. The coronation of a young woman as Ireland’s greatest ever athlete. The sense of possibility, the discovery of new frontiers, the entry to the world of “yes, I can”.

Ten years ago this week the many daughters of Sonia were feeling that.

Ten years! What a difference the daughters of Sonia have made to our sporting landscape. This month domestically we had the camogie and football All-Ireland finals in Croke Park. As spectacles, and as examples of women’s sports, those afternoons are unrecognisable from their equivalent 10 years ago.

Beyond that, this year and this past week in particular have been an extraordinary time for women’s sport. Watching the fresh-faced Irish under-17s having such fun and such success in Trinidad and Tobago during the week was just one of those occasions when you forgot about all the irritating fools like Stephen Ireland which sports brings us and remembered the joy of the games.

Katie Taylor is like that. The sort of person people root for because her personality is infectious and strong. And she performs in an arena which precludes the sort of reflex but patronising analysis which demands that somebody compare what she is doing with the way men do it. She fights. And getting hit by trained athletes of your own weight class hurts whether you are a man or a woman. Katie Taylor fights and never when you are watching her fight do you say to yourself “ah so this is women’s boxing”. It’s boxing. End of.

High point of the year? Well one of them was a radio interview which Katie Walsh did with various members of the Walsh family chipping in after she had ridden a couple of winners at Cheltenham. It was best to pull in the car you’d have been laughing so much. Hard it was to remind oneself of the sheer heroism of anybody who steers those beasts over the massive National Hunt obstacles.

How sweet it is after what happened to Sonia in Atlanta 1996 before she had even run a race to see this country produce a swimmer in Gráinne Murphy whose statistics and career curve provoke nothing but awe.

The list goes on and on and was beautifully expanded upon in these pages on Saturday by Mary Hannigan, who was herself but a young slip of a thing 10 years ago.

The point is we are only exploring the tip of the iceberg here. We are drilling for oil in a field of unknown potential. And yet we are taking no risk. The investment in and promotion of sport in general but women’s sport in particular is a no-lose prospect for any government and it costs a tiny fraction of what bailing out any single bank costs.

On Saturday morning I was chatting to one of the Dublin under-16 camogie team who created their own little bit of history in July when they beat Kilkenny in the Leinster final. I was asking her was she playing much in school now that the club season is winding down? She said sadly that the school didn’t do sport for girls. Can that be described as an education? Can the environment that fosters it be described as having a health policy?

Ten years on and we have so much to celebrate. Ten years down the road we can see more great days which put the tawdry state of this septic isle into some sort of happy perspective or we can look back and wonder how we wasted such a great natural resource.

Through our banks and our rotten state we’ve stolen enough already from our children and their children. Here’s a chance to pay something forward.