| By Sean Diffley, Irish Independent, 12th
August 2006
THIS very week, 21 years ago on the Belfield track,
a quartet of famous
milers set a world record.
It was the 4x1mile relay and the record set by Eamon
Coghlan, Marcus
O'Sullivan, Frank O'Mara and Ray Flynn was 15 minutes 49.08 seconds
and
it still remains inviolate. It beat the previous record set by a
team
from New Zealand.
The whole affair was organised by GOAL's indefatigable
and slightly
younger John O'Shea and to mark the 21st birthday the slightly older
O'Shea has organised a celebratory dinner at Jurys on Monday where
the
participants, and sundry others, will gather for a nostalgic look
back
at the heyday of Irish miling.
Heydey
The Irish may not have been setting the mile or 1500m quite alight
in
recent times but they certainly did in times past. As a famous
Irish-American pushing for political advancement used to say: "Let's
just look at the record."
Back in the early days before the 1500m became the
dominant force and
when the four-laps mile was the blue riband, the Kildare man Tommy
Conneff, running in the USA, set two world records.
Later, you will have heard of Ronnie Delany and that
Olympic feat in
1956, but more or less forgotten is that Delany was a huge celebrity
on
the US circuit, particularly on the popular indoor circuit where
he had
34 consecutive victories. And, of course, he held the world mile
indoor
record.
We Irish have a tendency to disregard affairs that
don't occur in our
own backyard. That applies to Coghlan, more famous for his world
5,000m
victory in Helsinki. A once-off like Delany's in Melbourne.
But Coghlan, like Delany, was for a long period one
of the most famous
sporting personalities in the US. He, too, dominated in that fiercely
combative indoor circuit. And his success was such that he was known
throughout the US as the 'Chairman of the boards'.
He was also a world indoor record-breaking miler and
I can recall once
seeing a page of the prestigious New York Times, a full broadsheet
page
packed with the weekend's events with just a single picture - a
smiling
Irishman, Eamon Coghlan.
Interestingly, when Coghlan set his world indoor mile
record of 3:49.78
in the Meadowlands arena in 1983, Flynn was second with America's
number
one, Steve Scott back in third.
Smiling
Flynn, of course, is the Irish record-holder over the mile and
O'Sullivan and O'Mara, the other pair who helped set the 21-year-old
world record, are both former world indoor champions. Quite a
considerable quartet by any reckoning.
And it now looks as though the mark they set together
will be theirs for
ever as the International Federation has now ceased to include the
4x1mile event in their list of official world records.
Miles don't rate as high with them as before. And
to blazes with them
too.
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