Emily Maher hopes to qualify for the Olympic Games next year in Sydney. No, Emily Maher will qualify for the Olympics next year. Her voice strikes a note of certainty. She will make the qualifying time and her coach, former sprinting gold medallist Linford Christie, will be the guiding light between now and the autumn of 2000. Of that she is sure. Already Christie's unwavering brand of self-belief is being assimilated. No bad thing. And the Christie drugs issue? It has all been a big, disgraceful mistake. Just a stride off the qualification mark for the 200 metres, few would deny that the talented Kilkenny teenager is Olympic material. "Sydney is my aim," she says. "The qualification mark is 22.6, I think. I ran a 23.66 slowing down towards the line, so I think I'll get the time, maybe even this year if I can get the races."
Maher came to public notice last year when she returned from Moscow to a fanfare reception at Dublin Airport as Olympic Youth 100 metres and 200 metres champion. Politicians put on their best suits and biggest smiles. The athletics governing body sent out their top brass, and the Olympic Council of Ireland fussed about her like a gaggle of spinsters around the parish priest. The media couldn't get enough of the 17-year-old. Since then, Maher has moved between her home town of Hugginstown into more rarefied circles. She has already spent much of the winter under the tutelage of Christie, and has brushed shoulders with the likes of Frankie Fredericks, rising British 100 metres talent Darren Campbell and European 400 metres champion Jamie Baulch.
It came out of a meeting Maher had with Christie in Dublin last year. When the former Olympic champion arrived to launch a line in toiletries in the Sports Bar in Temple Bar, she introduced herself. Since then the two athletes have moved closer, with Christie becoming as much a problem solver for Maher as an athletics coach.
"The whole thing (Christie's testing positive) makes athletes have less confidence in the system. All the athletes are running scared now," says Maher. "Every time an athlete is tested now they'd be concerned because this has happened. If they can do this . . . you know . . . I think it's a disgrace."
Within the last six months Maher has spent two months with her coach in Australia for warm weather training, travelled to the Caribbean for a two-week stint, and spent another two weeks in Lanzarote. Christie has been good to her.
But over the last week public opinion may have changed as British athletics went into convulsions after a routine test revealed the banned steroid nandrolone. Unusually, many athletes have come out in support of the former captain of the British team. Unmoved by the scientific evidence, Maher steadfastly adds her name to the list of supporters.
"Everybody who knows Linford knows it's not true," she says. "Everyone who knows him realises there is some mistake. I mean he's not even an international runner now. Our relationship definitely has not changed at all and I don't see that it will change. I am 100 per cent behind him.
"I train with Linford. He's my full-time coach and he's a very good coach. I don't see that this will affect my training programme at all. "He is a very good friend to me, a father figure. We talk all the time on the phone. He's one of the few people I can talk to," she says.
While Maher refuses to entertain assertions that Christie would knowingly take anything illegal, the scientists may prove more difficult to convince. Still, the teenager, strong willed and defiant, stands by her coach.
"I know that Linford is innocent. I know that. People always want to bring people down who are at the top. It happened to Michelle de Bruin and now it's happening with Linford."
