Athletic spirit is what keeps All Blacks ahead of the pack

Word came through around lunchtime on Wednesday they were down by the harbour end, but by the time we got there we’d already missed the boat, as it were, our old swimming spot off the Bray Promenade all calm again after the passing appearance of the All Blacks.

Those who had been in their presence were left awestruck by one thing more than anything, and that was their look of sheer athleticism, in and out of the water, a look they said was quite unlike any other. Perhaps it's this impression of being an athlete first and last –and the willingness to keep primed their immune systems – that still sets the New Zealand rugby team apart from the others, as if the rugby itself has nothing and everything to do with it.

Rudyard Kipling wrote: “If you can fill the unforgiving minute/ With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run/ Yours is the earth and everything that’s in it/ And – which is more – you’ll be a man, my son!”

It’s a beautiful refrain that never grows old and, just like Kipling did with The Jungle Book, is open to its own certain interpretation; for some of us it has always been the 60 seconds’ worth of the 400 metres running track, or the quarter-mile as we used to say, and what that still means as a standard test of both speed and endurance.

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This also being the same 60 seconds’ worth of distance – or just under, rather – that is the foundation of the sub-four-minute mile; as in running four laps of the track, never conceding to that unforgiving minute. Trace the history of that event over the years and, whatever about the rugby field, few countries have been on the same level footing the way Ireland and New Zealand have been.

On the heels of our own Ronnie Delany in the 1950s came Peter Snell in the 1960s, the three-time Olympic gold medal winner, later voted New Zealand's Sports Champion of the Century. The all-black singlet dominated much of that decade on the track, Snell famously pausing his victory celebration after winning the 800m in Rome in 1960 to root for his fellow New Zealander Murray Halberg, who duly won the next race on the schedule, the 5,000m.

Snell broke six world records, twice over the mile, and won the 800m-1,500m double in Tokyo in 1964 for the first time since 1920; no man has won it since. Halberg, who only took to running in 1950 after badly injuring his left arm in a rugby match, also set four world records, and like Snell was a protege of the New Zealand athletics coach Arthur Lydiard, who first preached the joys and merits of LSD – as in long, slow distance, not lysergic acid diethylamide.

Tradition

When John Walker carried on this tradition and won the 1,500m for New Zealand in Montreal in 1976, it's often said he denied our own Eamonn Coghlan in the process, which is only partly true: Coghlan was run into fourth place in part because he felt forced to take up the pace early on, knowing a slower race didn't necessarily suit him.

What also likely cost Coghlan was the fact most African nations boycotted Montreal after the All Blacks toured South Africa earlier in 1976, and the IOC refused to sanction New Zealand, even with South Africa already banned from the Olympics because of its apartheid policies. That meant no Filbert Bayi, the then world record holder from Tanzania, or Kenya’s Mike Boit, who would likely have done Coghlan’s job of taking up the early pace.

Walker and Coghlan filled plenty more unforgiving minutes and miles over the years, together and apart: Walker became the first man to run a sub-3:50 mile in 1975, a full 10 seconds faster than Roger Bannister’s historic sub-four 21 years previously; in 1983, Coghlan became the first man to run sub-3:50 indoors. Two years after that Walker won the race to run 100 sub-four-minute miles, on his home track in Auckland, and only two other men in history have passed that century milestone: the American Steve Scott, and our own Marcus O’Sullivan.

Not that Walker was the last of New Zealand’s urbane milers. Earlier this year, Nick Willis ran a sub-four-minute mile for the 19th successive year, bettering Walker’s record of 18 (from 1973 to 1990), and in many eyes the New Zealander is also the 2008 Olympic 1,500m champion, given the two athletes who finished ahead of him were later done for doping.

Different interpretation

Still, these days we look more to their rugby team for that Kipling-esque sense of the unforgiving minute, even if with a different sort of interpretation. Des McDonnell played rugby at Bective Rangers with Jerry Sexton, father of Johnny, back when the club was famous for its running game style and scoring a try at least every 15 minutes, Con Houlihan often walking from his home in Portobello to stand at one of the goal ends in Donnybrook and look on in admiration.

McDonnell remembers too when Sexton junior first appeared on the scene, then as equally deft with a tennis racket and golf club as he was with a rugby ball, and this week made some observations about this current New Zealand team and why they’ve already set a record for the most Test tries and points scored in a calendar year, their haul of 96 tries eclipsing the previous mark of 92 (set by Argentina in 2003), their 675 points surpassing the 658 of South Africa in 2007.

"It's as if every one of these All Blacks is an athlete first, a rugby player second," he told me. "Take Will Jordan, in their back three, the pace and the distance that he can run makes you wonder what he could have done in athletics, especially say in an event like the decathlon."

Indeed Jordan, still only 23, has now scored 16 tries in 11 Tests, and may be the player Ireland should fear the most at the Aviva on Saturday afternoon. Last week, Sonny Bill Williams told Keith Duggan of this newspaper that when the family lived in state housing in Mount Albert, on the edge of Auckland, there was a sort of running paradise on the doorstep. “You jumped the fence and the mountain was your backyard.”

As much as last week’s performance against Japan has been lauded, Ireland may not be setting out on the same level footing here, not against an All Blacks team who more than any other can fill the unforgiving minute with a series of short, sharp 10-second bursts.