The Irish performance: Ian O'Riordan argues our best track and field athletes will continue to be international also-rans unless the sport here is given a radical overhaul

It is now inevitable Alistair Cragg will win a medal. Irish athletics will have something to celebrate. It won't happen in this evening's Olympic 5,000-metre final, but Cragg without doubt has the talent and self-belief and whatever other qualities are necessary to medal on the world or European stage sometime before his career is out.

We know he was born in South Africa but when it happens Cragg deserves to be as proud of the moment as any great Irish distance runner of the past. Yet no one is being fooled into thinking Cragg is in any way representative of Irish athletics. Cragg represents the antithesis of Irish athletics. He trains unmercifully hard. He hasn't yet benefited from any major funding. He wants to inspire and motivate other Irish runners. He is a team player.

More than that, what Cragg has represents much of what is lacking in Irish athletics. He has a coach he reveres as much as he trusts. He has come out of the US scholarship system, which for all its shortcomings at least has decent planning, structures and facilities. Most of all, having been born and raised in South Africa he has the mentality now so rarely even detectable in the Irish athlete.

For all those reasons Cragg is at least a starting point for any evaluation of the obviously down-and-out state of Irish athletics during these Olympics. There's been so much criticism and argument and what-needs-to-be-done flying about it's hard to know where to start. This correspondent for one has heard it all before.

We could talk all night about athletes not performing at their best, why Sonia O'Sullivan even finished her 5,000 metres final and what Nick Sweeney was even doing here. We could wonder again why Adrian O'Dwyer couldn't clear 2.10 metres in the high jump and why Paul Brizzel couldn't break 21 seconds in the 200 metres. We could bang our heads against the wall.

But almost annually since the 1980s the question has been asked what ails Irish athletics. The answer is still the same: the entire structure of the sport needs changing, the facilities need to improve, and a lot of people need to get their act together. To say we can't compete on the world stage anymore is just a cop-out.

The one thing you notice about the nations now excelling in athletics - whatever their size - is the significance of their coaches. Take the great distance-running nations like Kenya and Ethiopia and Morocco. Yes, many of their athletes were born in the mountains and ran to school but the coaching structures are superb.

What Irish athletics needs more than anything else right now is a head coach with the power and know-how to bring it all together. The system as it exists is hopelessly fragmented. The athletes coming out to Athens never really had any team spirit because they never had the chance to feel it. There needs to be someone at the top.

That was the suggestion made to a prominent member of the Irish Sports Council this week - not John Treacy, the chief executive. But clearly there is that awareness there. The Sports Council has a statutory obligation to do what's best for sport in Ireland and a large part of that means handing out the money. Now more than ever Treacy needs to use that authority to shake up Irish athletics.

It will mean an overhaul of the Athletics Association of Ireland as it exists. People will have to go. In the strategic sense appointing a chief executive is more pressing than finding a head coach, but both should be a priority. If Treacy is planning to take action it can't come soon enough.

All through these Games there have been examples of what can be done with the proper structures, and a lot closer to home than Kenya and Ethiopia. After decades in the Olympic wilderness Sweden have restored respect to their athletics tradition, winning three gold medals in two days with heptathlete Carolina Kluft, high jumper Stefan Holm and triple jumper Christian Olsson. And they say Scandinavians tend to suffer from an inferiority complex.

All three had different backgrounds and different motivations. Olsson claims he was inspired by witnessing Jonathan Edwards at the 1995 World Championships in Gothenburg, while Kluft's future depended on a chance visit to an athletics track.

After those 1995 championships the Swedish federation was as good as broke. They got a major sponsor on board and set about rebuilding. Unlike Irish athletes, the likes of Kluft and Olsson don't get money into their hands; it's put directly into their training and travel expenses.

The situation where Irish athletes are handed around 20,000 a year and told to go off and do what they like with it has to end. There need to be strings attached, that they have to at least attend a specified number of national squad sessions.

To ensure that, though, they'll need the proper infrastructure. Since 1995 Sweden has built 25 sports halls containing 200-metre tracks. And the success is breeding success. Since Kluft won the world title in Paris last year, those halls have seen a 40-per-cent increase in attendances. This summer's Swedish championships brought a record 20,000 through the turnstiles.

Another model is in operation in Morocco, which produced the 1,500-metre winner, Hicham El Guerrouj. Their federation has 700 selected young athletes in a development programme that covers from Tangier to the edge of the Sahara and is staffed by part-time coaches.

The headquarters is a converted hotel in Rabat, which for 13 years has housed the Royal Moroccan Institute of Track and Field. Staffed by 17 full-time coaches, six physical therapists and two physicians, the institute is the training base for 150 athletes aged 15 and up. Next to it are three running tracks, one of which has the Olympic-standard Mondo surface.

Morocco has a per-capita income of less than $1,500 a year. Sure, they don't have hurling and football competing for their young talent but they don't have any excuses if things fail in Beijing and beyond. It shouldn't be too much to ask emerging Irish athletes be given the same chance.