David Gillick’s post-race interviews with athletes are television gold. He watches their body language, stays in the moment and, if they’re crushed, helps them navigate their emotions with the empathy of someone who has been in their position “on horrendous days” when all he wanted to do was hide.
“It’s about managing the heartbreak of it all,” he says.
Today, he’s a celebrated broadcaster, but the former 400m runner’s first experience of being part of the RTÉ Sport team, as a studio pundit for London 2012, was “weird” and painful. He should have been on the track competing in what would have been his second Olympic Games, but instead he was injured and dwelling on what might have been.
“I’m watching all my mates run, and I’m just sitting there thinking I should be out there, I’m better than him, I’ve run faster than him. Ego takes over, and you have that little bit of resentment.”
In his new memoir, The Race, he describes the whole grim build-up to London, the place where he had expected to peak, from the day he spotted “David Gillick, London 2012” on a giant sponsor’s billboard knowing he might not recover in time from a torn soleus (calf muscle) to the training session when a “twinge of pain” gave him his answer for sure.
He regretted saying yes to RTÉ at first, though as those games wore on, he realised being a pundit was better than sulking. He even started to like it. But “the hardest part” – watching the closing ceremony alone in a bedroom at his parents’ house – was still to come.
“It just looked like such a good party, but you’re not there, and you’re hating yourself. Why me, you know?”
By this point, the Dubliner had already tasted elite success, having won two golds at successive European Indoor Championships, enjoyed an “intoxicating rush of euphoria” after setting the men’s national 400m record of 44.77 seconds in Madrid in 2009 and been a finalist at the World Championships in Berlin that same year.
But, as he documents in The Race, he had also already known doubt, disappointment and anxiety. Later, he would struggle to adjust to retirement, as so many sportspeople do, and slide into despair.
He tells me that the original cover image of The Race showed him mid-run, but this was “too happy, too bright”. Now it shows him sitting on the track, open-mouthed, after finishing fifth in the European Championships final in Barcelona in 2010. He’s staring up at a screen that tells him he has missed out on gold by .02 of a second and bronze by 0.05 of a second. It remains the one race he replays in his mind.
“If I had run my best time in that race, I would have won. But it doesn’t always happen like that, and then you’re left with the aftermath. It’s not like the following week you can go out and run it again.”
He wanted to be open in his memoir about the brutal emotional and financial impact of races that don’t pan out as hoped.
“I don’t think people realise how cut-throat athletics is, and how, if you don’t perform, the consequences of that one race, that one championship, can define you,” he says.
When Gill Books asked him in late 2024 if he would like to write the book, he was unsure at first – he had “kind of shut that whole 10 years” of his life away in training diaries stored in the attic.
His upbringing in Ballinteer in Dublin was “fairly normal”, he says, which also put him off. “Like, there was no drama, nothing out of the ordinary.”
I was angry and I was bitter but I also had that fear of, like, if I’m not running, what the hell do I do?
— David Gillick
The youngest of four children, he was the fastest kid in his area, which gave him “street cred”. Sport was where he felt best about himself, and it was part of the fabric of his family – his mother, Sheila Gillick, played on the first Irish women’s basketball team in 1973. Like his older siblings, he started running for Dundrum South Dublin, the athletics club at the end of their road.
In his mid-teens, he and his mates “did the normal stuff”, drinking cans in fields, though none were as fast as him at sprinting away from any approaching gardaí. “I’d leg it, like. I was never getting caught,” he says.
As he matured, he “made peace” with the fear of missing out, and his participation in soccer, then Gaelic football, dropped off. After representing Ireland aged 19 in what was then called the World Junior Championships, held in Jamaica in 2002, he knew he wanted to be on the track.
The star turn was 15-year-old prodigy Usain Bolt and it felt “amazing just to be there in a stadium that was going absolutely bonkers for this young kid”. Luckily, Bolt did not compete in the 400m, Gillick’s event. Unluckily, the 400m is widely considered to be the hardest track race on the body.
“It ruins you. It’s like electrocuting yourself for 44 seconds. It just hurts like hell.”
Once he agreed to go ahead with the memoir, he knew he wanted to “go all in” on the various ways in which athletics can hurt like hell. Cathal Dennehy, the journalist he worked with on it, was “immense”, asking him lots of tough questions.
His wife’s first reaction was “Oh, God”, but she was also involved throughout.
“Charlotte’s been through it with me and supported me through some awful days,” he says.
“Sometimes when you go through tough times you feel that maybe it’s better off just left behind, but as difficult as it was to talk about hard times, we also talked about the good times. You can easily forget them. We’ve had so many great experiences and they brought us together, and it’s nice that she had a pivotal role in all of it.”
[ David Gillick’s terrific book reminds us of how little we know about sportspeopleOpens in new window ]
He met Charlotte Gillick, née Wickham, in Loughborough in England, where he was based for most of his career. He’d bought a house in the East Midlands town in 2007 and was renting out rooms to cover the mortgage. Charlotte, a middle-distance runner from Sunderland, moved in and they got to know each other while assembling Ikea furniture. He fancied her, but he was wary about making a move. Enter RTÉ, which was keen for him to attend the RTÉ Sports Awards that December and offered to pay for flights back to Dublin. He invited Charlotte and they shared their first kiss in his parents’ house.
“And then the Olympics just took over absolutely every aspect of my life.”
From October 2007 until the Beijing games in August 2008, he was stressed out and “just a complete pain in the hole”. In Beijing, something felt off from the outset. On the plane there, he broke out in mouth ulcers, a sign that he was run down. He was overwhelmed, too.
“I just never felt in the right frame of mind. I didn’t feel relaxed. I remember going into the [athletes’] village and it was noisy, and you’re almost like a kid, there’s so much going on.”
He could feel his anxiety growing as his 400m heat neared. When the gun fired, he was laboured and lethargic; his legs “went missing”, and he didn’t qualify for the semi-final. It was the start of what he calls “a rampage of self-hate”.
After tests on his return to Dublin, a doctor told him he had a viral infection. It gave him some comfort to know that something physical had been awry, but deep down he felt his immune system had crashed because he had been on edge for so long.
In his deeply affecting memoir, Gillick also writes about the loneliness he endured after an ill-fated switch to a new training base in Florida in late 2010.
“I’d never been there before. I literally just flew in, and this was it, the next phase of my life, and straight away, I felt isolated,” he says. There was no cafe culture and, after training, nothing to do. “There’s only so many times you can go to a Florida mall.”
In Loughborough, his old coach, Nick Dakin, would reassure him that things were going in the right direction, but in Florida he wasn’t getting that, and his confidence began to ebb away. The stress he heaped on himself led to the torn soleus, he believes.
“It was like someone had stuck a hot rod into my lower calf. Sometimes you just know it’s bad.”
After missing out on London, he contemplated hanging up his spikes. He lost his sponsors, and his government grant was not renewed – calls he knew would come.
“I was angry and I was bitter but I also had that fear of, like, if I’m not running, what the hell do I do?”
He decided to give it another year, but under the same roof as Charlotte. He found a coach in Canberra, Australia, and they relocated. He had no expectations, but the change of scenery was welcome, and he was enjoying running again – until he picked up a hairline tear in his Achilles. He was about to turn 30. This time, it really did feel over.
“Everyone deals with retirement and the end of a career differently. I think the hard thing for me was that I didn’t get to do it on my terms and then you just feel like you’re in a broken heap, you know? That’s when panic kind of set in.”
Coming home to Dublin to take part in Celebrity MasterChef Ireland was “good craic and stuff” but didn’t alleviate the crisis – if anything, winning the series put pressure on him to use the victory as a springboard to a new career.
His identity, for so long, had been tied up in running.
“Then that goes and I was like, ‘Who am I?’ Is that all people see me as, just a runner? Am I just some stupid fellah who used to run and who’s got nothing else to offer? And that’s pretty much what I told myself in my head.”
He got a job as a marketing rep for sports brand New Balance, and later he joined a company, run by his former sports psychologist, in which he went into corporate environments and spoke about his high-performance mindset. Inside, he was spiralling. He relationship with running turned “toxic”, he started to binge-eat and he had trouble sleeping. His emotions were volatile, his thoughts dark.
“The rage would build up. I’d be red raw, like, you know?”
He was delighted to marry Charlotte in 2014 but had expected to be in a different place by the time they tied the knot. “I just thought I’d be a little more secure in my identity, more secure in a job. I thought I’d be more robust.”
That was probably the biggest thing. I used to berate myself
— David Gillick
In 2015, his panic attacks worsened. He remembers having “a complete and utter meltdown” while Charlotte, pregnant with their first child, sat distraught in their kitchen. He knew he needed help.
He reached out to Richie Sadlier, the former international footballer who had spoken about his own depression. During a walk through Marlay Park, Sadlier gave him the names of three therapists and the advice to try them one by one.
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Therapy, it turned out, was not unlike athletics. There was a process, and if he showed up every week, he got results. He even learned to love running again and, though no longer at his peak, relished pulling on an Irish vest in 2016 for one last summer.
He continues to see a counsellor every week, he says.
“It’s been nearly 10 years, like, amazing really. But it’s a massive learning curve, and it’s just about allowing yourself to maybe come to terms with what you have gone through and how you talk to yourself. That was probably the biggest thing. I used to berate myself.”
As an athlete, his perfectionism had helped him strive to get better, but it had also worked against him. He would obsess and over-analyse, and if he missed a training target, it would gnaw away at him. In retirement, that same ruthless self-criticism proved disastrous.
He writes that when he stopped competing in 2013, no one from Athletics Ireland or Sport Ireland formally reached out to see how he was coping. The structure just wasn’t there for that to happen. It was all about “who’s next?” But things are changing, he says.
Sporting bodies here now pay far more attention to sports psychology, mental health and training needs, while there are more supports available as athletes transition into retirement.
Gillick is thoughtful about these issues and others that still dog athletics, from the scourge of doping to underinvestment in coaching. As for the battle to attract new fans to track and field, he is now playing a key role.
He could sense a surge in interest at the European Championships in Munich in 2022, when his interviews in the mixed zone – the area where athletes interact with the media – won him new praise.
“It was the first year that the GAA finished up early, so in August there wasn’t a whole lot going on. Next minute you had a week of athletics in prime time, and we got good results. Suddenly, people were watching it. I came home and people were talking about athletics. They knew the names,” he says.
Then came the craziness of Paris 2024. His phone was exploding, all thanks to his compelling encounters in the mixed zone.
He recalls watching Rhasidat Adeleke’s 400m final “as a fan”, hoping she would medal, then seeing her come up to him “completely and utter shell-shocked” after finishing fourth.
“I remember thinking that an interview’s not about me, it’s about her. But I could see she just couldn’t talk, so I just tried to fill the void and put things in context, like about how well she’d done over the course of the year. And then slowly but surely she began to speak a little bit.”
He’s there to be a familiar face, not to shaft anyone, he says, as he understands what it feels like to be “thrown into the limelight” when you’re at your most vulnerable.
“I’m never looking for tears. I’ve had athletes come up in floods of tears and told them to come back to us in two minutes.”
He’s not long home after this year’s World Championships in Tokyo when we meet, and he anticipates being in Birmingham next year for the European Championships. “It could be our best ever Europeans in terms of the people we have at the pointy end of their events.”
Now 42, he is active away from the microphone, too, between training for this weekend’s Dublin Marathon and coaching kids, including his own: Oscar (9), Olivia (7) and Louis (4). He is a soccer coach to Oscar (who also does athletics) and coaches Olivia in running, though for now it’s “just about having a bit of fun with their friends” – he saw in his own time what happens when kids have the joy “sucked out” of sport.
They live in Ballinteer, close to his parents, and are “very lucky” to have Marlay Park on their doorstep. Running remains a source of clarity for him, while his reporting role with RTÉ is “a privilege”, he says.
Watching a new generation of athletes coming out of the tunnel, he wonders how he ever did it himself.
“You always get a little bit nervous for them, because you know what they’re thinking, you know the process of trying to execute the race. But also, you’re thinking, ‘Oh, wouldn’t it be great to still be out there in the form of your life.’ And, you know, winning is great, but there’s no better feeling than running a personal best.”
The Race: The inside track on the ruthless world of elite athletics by David Gillick is published by Gill Books.
