Here they come, four of them sweating and panting. Off the track and down the mixed zone where no media wants to speak to them. They hug Maeve Kyle. They hug athletics team manager Patsy McGonagle. There is a little knot of green vests and white tracksuits. And that's about the last of it really. The women's 4x400 metre relay team leave McGonagle with nothing left in his week except watching Sonia.

All week it's been the same story. Hard-breathing kids coming off the track, in tears sometimes, out of breath always, most having busted a gut. And McGonagle has been there. They've thrown arms around him. Thanked him. He's told them he's proud. He's looked after them till the end.

It's been something to see them. Breda Dennehy-Willis came off the other day near tears after a fruitless 10,000-metre heat and flung her arms around McGonagle, calling for him to be made manager of the Irish team for the World Cross Country Championship next spring. The loyalty to McGonagle was typical.

"That's you gone," an old athletics friend told McGonagle when he read the Dennehy-Willis quote. Having an athlete back you. Fatal.

The loyalty is two-way. McGonagle explains that these Olympics started with more than 60 people trying to make the athletics team. He called them, he cajoled them, he encouraged them. They'd run personal bests and he'd tell them the whole country was proud of them. He pushed for training camps. He came to realise that the closer you get to the athletes the more offside you get with a certain cabal in Irish athletics. "It's not an athlete-friendly situation," he says. "Athletes will say that about Athletics Ireland, the contact there is not athlete-friendly."

Now McGonagle has had enough. Not of the Games. Or the athletes. He's loved that odyssey. He's had enough of the people who run Irish athletics. The blazers. The nabobs. The politicos. For everything that's good in Irish athletics he feels they insert something that is small and unpleasant.

These haven't been a good Games for Ireland. McGonagle has had enough of the war between the OCI and the Athletics Ireland people. He hasn't a lot of time left for either of them. The other day in the Olympic Village he met himself coming towards himself, somebody coming toward him with an athletics accreditation signifying he was the manager of the Irish athletics team. McGonagle hadn't been able to secure accreditation, which is not in the AAI's gift, for a throwing coach for his team. Here was some goombah with a second athletics manager badge.

For the failure on the track he knows whom he blames. He knows whom the blazers will try to blame.

"It's been a rollercoaster for quite some time," he says. "There's a job for somebody out there. Sorting it out. I should have been a tightrope walker. I was either going to fall on the Olympic Council side or the athletics side and I was going to be eaten alive either way. And there was no crowd cheering for me. In the last few weeks the sniping from Athletics Ireland has become a significant part of my life. I don't know the agenda, I just know it's there."

Athletics Ireland is a small, almost incestuous organisation run by the same coterie of people year in year out. Go back to Eamon Coghlan being wedged out of the chief executive job after 120 days and you'll see the same faces. Sonia being made strip. Same people. This debacle? Same folks. Speak to Irish elite athletes about it and they bolt for the safety of "off the record comments". Listen to them talk about it among themselves and they are bitter and disillusioned.

The politics of the organisation are notoriously vicious. In recent weeks certain officers have reduced colleagues to tears. McGonagle recalls a meeting just before the Olympics where the case of Una English's non-selection was brought up by an officer of the association who wanted English to replace Rosemary Ryan in the Olympic team.

"For instance we had a selectors' meeting on the night before we left Dublin to pick the Olympic teams. Now the team was going at 6.30 a.m. the next morning so you can read that whatever way you want to, but I gave no opinion at the meeting. It was a farce. There were other athletes picked for the relay squad other than those who were going to the Olympic Games and as you know there were High Court cases after that.

"After the vote was taken that night a certain individual became very abusive at the end of the meeting. One man was reduced to tears during the meeting. Myself, I kept it together until I left the meeting. My wife was waiting for me. When I got to Clonliffe Road to meet her, well the stress got to me a bit too. It was in-your-face, abusive confrontation."

McGonagle came to Australia hoping that he had left the politics behind him. Agendas are hardy creatures however. An agenda followed him all the way to New South Wales.

"I had to take receipt of a hand-delivered letter handed in at the training camp in Newcastle signed by the national secretary and marked private and confidential. I said nothing until I discovered that the whole world had been shown this letter. The letter was picking the relay teams and instructed myself and the coaches not under any circumstances to pick the team, we were not to have any run-offs. Nothing.

"I resented that letter. It was an open insult. The coaches resented that letter. It was a bit of a slap in the face as the coaching staff here are so experienced. We didn't say a pile about that to anybody until we discovered it was widely known that it had been sent. The situation was this: they were going to try and pick a team six weeks before the race; one of the starting names on that team isn't here. Still in Dublin. Crazy. Insulting.

"Then I had a coach on the ground out here, not a part of the official team, and he came along one night and threatened to pull his athletes out of the relay. We ran a runoff 10 days ago to get an update on form. I had to be seen to be fair to the kids who wouldn't make the team so I said `let's see the form, who's going well'. Ten days before a race if they can't run 400 metres they'll be no use in the Olympic stadium.

"He said he'd send two home and pull the other one. I hardballed that and I was abused." He says the parents of the athletes got his mobile phone number and were told to put pressure on him. "With all due respect to the Community Games it wouldn't happen at that level."

There was precedent. In Irish athletics nothing is ever new. At last year's World Championships in Seville there was an unholy row about the make-up of a men's relay team. McGonagle faced his critics down. The runner he stood by ran the fastest Irish time in the race. AI brass didn't speak to McGonagle for five months afterwards.

Since the hand-delivered letter arrived in Newcastle communication between Dublin and Sydney has been minimal to the point of being non-existent. McGonagle feels that the lack of support hasn't gone unnoticed by the athletes.

"Myself, well I've said this before, I'm not a gobshite. If there was a point somebody wanted to make to me they knew where I was. I was in no mood to be sociable after that, though. Two out of three relay teams we picked here have broken national records. There's the response."

And the Athletics Ireland presence in Sydney?

"Nick Davis (the president of AI) I saw him at a reception. He came over. He started to wave the finger. I let him go for a while. I said my piece. That's the only time I've seen him. Which is a pity. Other members of the executive of Athletics Ireland, former NACA members, as it happens, came in and were well-received.

Late this week McGonagle was censured by Dermot Nagle, the national secretary. Too much talk. Too many ideas.

"They have let it be known that they are unhappy with what I have said to the press. I'm putting myself under serious pressure. I know that. You don't talk to the press. You keep the head down. But that won't change anything. Where would that put me if I kept my mouth shut? If I let somebody in Dublin pick a relay team six weeks before the Olympics would I be able to say I did the right thing? We have to go beyond all this.

This is probably my last chance to have an impact.

"I just want planning. We are dealing with elite sport, this is a serious business, we represent our country here. I see things wrong. We in Athletics Ireland need to get more professional. In every respect. We need a chief executive. We have a great group of 5,000-metre women, say. We have to lead it in, be professional."

He reckons it won't be a four-year fix, we in Ireland are looking eight years down the road. "You cannot start with elite sport. Educational and recreational aspects of sport have to be dealt with. Give the kids an opportunity in a variety of activities. If you don't have the youngsters, well you're lost."

He must carry the message. "If they get me in the long grass I've plenty to do."

He does. What he has achieved in athletics in Donegal is a blueprint for sports in Ireland. Five thousand primary school kids in the county are involved. Eighty nine schools. Two million pounds has gone into Finn Valley athletics club.

"Whatever they do, whatever little games they play, I'll always have that, what we've achieved in our own place."

And he hurries off. A good and passionate man with tigers after him.