ATHLETICS:Yet again Ireland has enjoyed some fine athletic performances not because of the system but in spite of it, writes IAN O'RIORDAN

SOME OF us came to Berlin not sure what to expect. The danger with these trips is that they can very quickly and very easily fall flat. Anticipation is one thing, living up to it is another, but the moment we stepped off the S-Bahn at Alexanderplatz I had a good feeling about the place. There was a strong whiff of history in the air and a lot of other things too.

Little did any of us realise the wild swings in excitement that lay in store. At times it was like an old-fashioned rollercoaster because along with the thrilling highs there were some frightening lows. Throw in some great weather, great people and numerous great surprises, and Berlin has definitely surpassed all expectations. Out in the old Olympic Stadium, the athletics have been pretty good too.

It may be 20 years now since gangs of crazy Germans swarmed over the Berlin Wall, waving fistfuls of money and screaming Deutschland über alles but the revolutionary vibe is still alive and kicking. You don’t have to be a tall blond man with flashing blue eyes to feel comfortable about saying “Ich bin ein Berliner!”

Everyone fits in, male, female, and whatever does actually lie in between. If anybody can find a problem with this place they can’t blame the Germans.

And forget about New York. Berlin is the city that never sleeps. I know that because for two nights in succession I didn’t sleep a wink – the first night after a public health scare in my original hotel, and the second night after bunking in with a chronic snorer.

A graph of the Irish performances over the opening seven days would be mostly flat and then punctuated by several extraordinary highs. Those highs were still enough to render the whole thing a triumph.

Truth is I was more nervous about seeking approval from the sports editor for this trip than I was any other. The Beijing Olympics were still fresh in his mind, where the majority of the Irish athletes either underperformed, or else didn’t perform at all. “Sure I’ll always have Usain Bolt to write about,” I told him, and at least that much was true. Bolt may be the biggest star in the history of track and field and couldn’t have come along at a better time.

Then on the opening day of the championships last Saturday the first three Irish athletes in action vanished without a trace, and straightway I began to fear for the worst. The only way of dealing with it was to head over to Bar 25, one of the trendy new joints that have sprung up along the Spree River on the side of old East Berlin.

Judging by the dress code it could just as easily have been East LA but it proved the perfect place to chime the night away. After all we hadn’t come all the way out here just to watch athletics, had we? By Sunday morning Berlin was full of anticipation again, and persuaded me to walk the mile or so from my hotel down to the Brandenburg Gate for the start of the women’s 20km walk.

This, in fact, took me down some of the race route along the Unter den Linden, the old boulevard of linden trees which formerly led directly to the city palace of the Prussian monarchs. About halfway down I was already parched, and stopped for a breather at one of the many Berliner Pilsner stalls. “Very hot,” nodded the attendant, and with that I started to wonder how on earth Olive Loughnane was going to survive 20km of race walking.

About an hour later I had my answer. I’m no expert in race walking and to be honest no one fully understands the event unless they’ve actually done it. It’s painfully technical and technically the toughest event of the lot. What ultimately took Loughnane into her medal winning position at halfway and kept her there until the finish was the knowledge that she had finally mastered the event after 10 years of trying, that she was just as good as anyone else out there and nothing was going to stand in the way of her just reward. In the end Loughnane got exactly that, a silver medal and one of the most historic images of Irish sport to go with it.

The background to her success made it all the sweeter. A mother of one, largely self-coached, with the key component of her high-performance plan being the support of family and friends, without which she wouldn’t have been in Berlin at all. No one can make it on their own in this sport, but if there is still such a thing as an athletics “system” in Ireland, then Loughnane operates almost entirely outside of it.

In ways this became the trend among the other Irish athletes who lived up to their expectations during the past week. You can prepare as thoroughly and diligently as everyone else but unless you truly believe you can mix it with the best of them then chances are you won’t. There’s certainly no point in relying on Athletics Ireland to pull you through. They have a fine manager out here in Patsy McGonagle but they have no chief executive, no director of athletics and no high performance manager.

Yet again Ireland has enjoyed some fine athletic performances not because of the system but in spite of it.

Sometimes it is difficult to know if you do actually believe it yourself or if in fact you’re just fooling yourself. When David Gillick ran 44.77 seconds last month he straightaway believed he could make the 400 metres final. The same with Derval O’Rourke. The morning after her superb fourth place in the 100 metre hurdles, I found her having orange juice and croissants with her parents and coach at a small café bar somewhere in Old Mitte.

Typical of O’Rourke, she wasn’t shy about revealing the deep lows she’d been through over the pervious two years, the lowest point obviously being Beijing, where her first-round exit in the heats left her contemplating retirement.

“Suicidal, actually,” she said. What drove her on was the enduring belief she could still mix it with the best of them. Ultimately there were a lot of things driving O’Rourke last Wednesday night but I got the feeling the big thing was the chance to prove wrong all those who didn’t believe in her.

Of course there is always a fine line between believing and achieving, no matter what the sport, and for sure Paul Hession believed he was going to make the 200 metres final. When he didn’t, at least he had the honesty to admit he wasn’t good enough. He was hard on himself but at the same time there was something refreshing about it. It beat the same old excuses that some Irish athletes offered out here, although they could barely be heard anyway over the noise of the packed stadium. That’s the danger with these trips. If you don’t deliver, things can very quickly and very easily fall on dear ears. Success, in any sport, has to be believed to be seen.