I was taking the roof and doors off the Jeep Wrangler for the weekend when a neighbour not seen in a while cycled by. Always keen for the inside scoop on our athletes, he stopped in for a few minutes. Our conversation soon turned to this weekend’s World Athletics Relays in Guangzhou, China.
“Tell me, when did we suddenly become so good at the relays?”
Assuming he meant the sprint relays, this demanded some gentle clarification, given the long history of World and European relay records Irish athletes have broken over the years. Including one set in the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum in 1964 and another milestone of a record still standing after 40 years.
“Well, how much time have you got?”
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Off the top of my head there was one place to begin. Long before Robert Prevost earned his mathematics degree in 1977 at Villanova University, Ronnie Delany was furthering his athletics reputation there at the famed Penn Relays in Philadelphia, the oldest and largest track and field competition in the US.
In his sophomore year in 1956, Delany helped Villanova win three Penn Relays titles, running the anchor leg in both the sprint and distance medley. Later that year he was Olympic 1,500m champion.
Delany won 10 Penn Relays titles in all. As a matter of fact, his last five races were all in the relay. In the winter of 1962, he was part of the Irish 4x800m quartet that toured the US indoor circuit. Having already broken the European 4x800m record in 1961, they won three of their five races. Delany then retired in the summer of 1962, due to injury, on the same day he announced his engagement to fiancée Joan.
Also part of that 4x800m quartet was Noel Carroll, then in his first year at Villanova. Born and raised in the seaside village of Annagassan in Louth, he dropped out of school at 13 and held a series of jobs before beginning his running career in the army. His relay exploits with Delany first caught the eye of Villanova’s legendary track coach James F Elliott, better known as Jumbo.
In 1964, Carroll anchored the Villanova team that broke the world 4x800m record at the Coliseum Relays in Los Angeles, running a 1:46.9 split. Carroll always considered himself a tactical half-miler, with The New York Times once describing his mid-race machinations as “like a scene-shifter at the Abbey Theatre”. That must have been some sight, his 6ft 3in hulking frame tearing around the Coliseum.
Then he comes back the next day and says he has an even better idea, that we’d go for the mile-relay record
— John O'Shea
Always the embodiment of clean living and physical fitness, Carroll achieved many great things in his life, which was sadly cut short in 1998, at the age of 56. As well as co-founding the Dublin Marathon, he also played an instrumental role in one of the best Irish relay performances of all time, also known as the GOAL 4xmile record attempt, staged in Belfield 40 years ago this August.
This idea was dreamed up by John O’Shea, who wasn’t long back from a trip to Ethiopia that spring of 1985, where the famine which made global headlines the previous Christmas was still ravaging the country. Scenes from Ethiopia had pressed Bob Geldof into putting on a benefit concert at Wembley Stadium called Live Aid.
O’Shea had set up his own relief agency, GOAL, in 1977. It was a lunchtime visit to Trinity College in July 1985, where Carroll was finishing up a training run, that inspired his fundraising effort.
“Noel thought it was an okay idea, but said he‘d look at the record books,” O’Shea told The Irish Times in 2020. “I think he wanted it to be a half-mile record attempt; he was always so obsessed with the half-mile. Then he comes back the next day and says he has an even better idea, that we‘d go for the mile-relay record, which he‘d seen had recently been set by New Zealand.”
O’Shea already had his cast in mind: Eamonn Coghlan, the then world indoor mile record holder, with his 3:49.78, set in 1983; Ray Flynn, the then Irish mile record holder with his 3:49.77, set in 1982; Marcus O’Sullivan, the 23-year-old from Cork who had run a 3:52.64 mile that July; and Frank O’Mara from Limerick, also fast rising up the mile ranks and who would run 3:51.06 a year later.
The only obstacle was Coghlan’s state of fitness. A freak back injury prevented him from properly training for months and he told O’Shea there was no way he could run.
Coghlan took up the story from there: “Then John comes back again and tells me to f**k off, he‘s got John Treacy to run instead. Then Noel Carroll came on the phone... Noel is a bit more diplomatic, saying it wouldn’t be the same if the record was broken and I wasn’t on the team. So I go back to John O’Shea the next day and said ‘okay, I’ll do it’.”
After Coghlan clocked his 4:00.20, he passed off to O’Sullivan, who dropped in a 3:55.30. O’Mara then ran a 3:56.60 and Flynn brought them home with his 3:56.98. They finished in 15:49.08 – over 10 seconds inside the New Zealand mark.
The 4xmile may be a rarely run distance. However, in 2022, an All-Star Oregon Nike team, which included reigning Olympic 1,500m champion Cole Hocker, attempted to break Ireland’s world record and finished three seconds short, in 15:52.04.
In 2004, an Irish women’s 4x1,500m team that included Sonia O’Sullivan and underage star Maria Lynch, ran a European record of 17:19.09 which also still stands. That same year, Ireland won its first championship medal in a sprint relay, the men’s 4x400m snatching a World Indoor bronze. This was aided somewhat by the fact the US team dropped the baton and the Bahamian team fell over.
These are now unprecedented times in the sprint relays – the mixed 4x400m winning European gold last June, the women’s 4x400m just a fraction of a second away from Olympic bronze in Paris – but don’t forget our illustrious relay history from long before that. Just in case anyone is asking.
