Athletics: Ireland's new model foot soldier

AFTER TWO laps of Amsterdam, Catherina McKiernan could be a millionaire a week today. Organisers of the Amsterdam Marathon, which skirts round the city boundaries twice, have offered a bonus of one million guilders, some pounds 320,000, if the Irishwoman who won this year's London Marathon makes it back to the 1928 Olympic Stadium in world-record time.

McKiernan laughed at the thought of the seven- figure carrot. "Do you think it would make you run any faster? I don't think so," she said. "If you haven't done the work and you're not capable of it, it doesn't matter what the prize is."

McKiernan has done the work. The physiological tests she undergoes every three months at Trinity College Dublin, indicate she is in shape to run a fast time. Her performance in the Route du Vin half-marathon in Luxembourg last month, which she won in 68min 54sec, suggests the same. Whether she can run faster than 2hr 20min 47sec, the world-best time Tegla Loroupe set in Rotterdam six months ago, remains to be seen, though it would seem to be within McKiernan's capability.

In the two marathons she has run to date she has not yet extended herself over the full 26 miles 385 yards. In Berlin in September last year she started cautiously and finished strongly to win in 2:23:29, the fastest ever debut by a woman, while in London in April, where any prospect of record times went with the morning wind, she overcame a mid-race deficit of 1min 40sec to triumph in 2:26:26. In Amsterdam she will be pushed all the way, having accepted the offer of male pacemakers that Jos Hermens, also race director of the Rotterdam Marathon, controversially - but, strictly, permissably - extended to Loroupe on her record-breaking run in April.

McKiernan, though, is refusing to entertain world-record talk as she applies the finishing touches to her preparations on home soil. It is simply not in her endearingly pragmatic nature to play the fate-tempting game. Paul Kimmage, writing in Ireland's Sunday Independent, described her as "a Bermuda Triangle" when every question leading towards a bold prediction was politely shot down at the press conference she was obliged to attend before the London Marathon. "What did he want me to say?" she pondered. "That I'm going to win and all that sort of stuff. Sure, that's rubbish talk."

The only prognostication McKiernan is prepared to make is that she intends to chase a fast time, weather permitting. "If the conditions are good, I'll be going out hard at the start," she said. "Berlin was my first marathon, so I had to be very careful in what I did because I wasn't sure. Then London was tactical and I just wanted to win the race. But this one, if the conditions are good, I'm going to go out hard and try to get a fast time. The course is virtually flat. The training's gone well. Hopefully we'll get a good day in Amsterdam."

Gale force winds and icy fog have affected the last two Amsterdam marathons but it would be another good day for Irish athletics if the heavens helped McKiernan to a record- breaking run. It has already been a vintage year for the sport in the Emerald Isle, with McKiernan's London victory and the sparkling return to form that has earned Sonia O'Sullivan two world cross-country titles and two European championship gold medals. O'Sullivan also set a new world- best time for two miles, 9min 18.58sec, at the Cork City Sports in June but no athletic son or daughter of Erin has broken a world record in a standard Olympic programme event for 97 years.

Bob Tisdale finished 0.3sec inside world record time when he won the Olympic 400m hurdles title, in 51.7sec, in Los Angeles in 1932 but, such were the rules at the time, because he knocked over the final barrier the record went instead to the silver medallist, Glenn Hardin of the US. Pat O'Callaghan, the Olympic hammer champion in 1928 and 1932, was also denied a world record by the cruel hand of bureaucracy - because he was a member of the National Athletic and Cycling Federation of Ireland, a body not recognised by the International Amateur Athletic Federation. Not since 5 August 1901, when Peter O'Connor long jumped 7.61m at Croke Park in Dublin, has Ireland had a world record breaker in a mainstream athletics event.

When O'Connor, a pipe-smoking Wicklow man, won the triple jump title at the unofficial 1906 Olympics in Athens, representing Great Britain and Ireland, he shinned up the flag-pole at the victory ceremony and replaced the Union Flag with a green one. McKiernan, like the legend in whose leaping stride she may be destined to follow, has remained loyal to her green roots too. Unlike Ireland's leading track and field lights of recent years - Eamonn Coghlan, John Treacy, Frank O'Mara, Marcus O'Sullivan, Ray Flynn and Sonia O'Sullivan - she has broken through to the world-class ranks without being groomed by the American collegiate system. She had the chance to, when she left school, but chose to remain in Cornafean, the County Cavan village where her parents run a dairy farm, training on the local golf course in her lunch hour.

McKiernan, 29 next month, has been a full-time runner for two years. She lives in Dublin, near Phoenix Park, but continues to be guided by Joe Doonan, the schoolteacher who has coached her since she took up cross country in her early teens. For the past eight years Doonan has used the Human Performance Laboratory at Trinity College to assess McKiernan's fitness. Tests in 1991 identified the marathon as her ideal distance but she made her mark as a country girl before taking to the roads last year.

If the winter weather holds off, she might run an ideal marathon on her two laps of Amsterdam on Sunday and become the first woman to break 2hr 20min. The financial climate has certainly changed in the 45 years since Jim Peters became the first man to breach the landmark barrier, wearing a pair of Woolworth plimsolls in the Polytechnic Marathon. He made nothing like a million. In fact, he made less than nothing. It cost him 10 shillings to enter.