An insight into the training schedules of Ireland's gold medal prospect in the 10,000 metres.
The heat is climbing into the seventies and the humidity even higher. It bakes the synthetic track at a high school in Providence, Rhode Island, where John Treacy and a top American runner, Danny Dillon, are into the fifteenth lap of their toughest workout in the week - the speed-training.
So many groups of national selectors got so many things wrong in the 1980 international rugby championship that it was small wonder that it finished up in a way that no knowledgeable critic could have predicted with England winning the international championship, the Triple Crown, the Grand Slam and the Calcutta Cup; with France buried at the bottom of the table, sharing the wooden spoon with Scotland; and with Wales reduced to anonymity, having been buried by Ireland at Lansdowne Road.
Ray McLoughlin analyses the causes for Ireland's failure in International Rugby
How Lord Killanin is playing for time in an effort to outwit Jimmy Carter and Margaret Thatcher.
The result, and the game itself, produced more than its share of paradox. The North clearly has the weaker team. Their manager too was under pressure to change the squad, along with considerable pressure from critics about his whole approach. Inside the game itself, Blanchflower is regarded with suspicion. He defined his own situation as manager as being a "fairly amateurish one". It's not an approach likely to endear itself to professionals, and even Giles, in unguarded moments, let slip the view that he didn't believe one could approach the job that way.
The significance of Tony Hanahoe's achievement in Gaelic football is already well established.
How did Munster beat the All Blacks?
I suppose it was inevitable that Munster would beat a touring side sooner or later as it had come so close to doing so a so many occasions. It was also probably inevitable that the All Blacks would be beaten at least once on tour. No matter how proficient a touring side is, it is extremely difficult to win every match, especially as the provincial sides they meet in mid-week regard the encounter almost as a do-or-die occasion. The combination of these two inevitabitieS had a lot to do with the Munster win.
The selection of Shay Deering as capptain of the Irish rugby team is some compensation for years of frustration and disappointment.
During the course of the week prior to the international match against England, one Irish paper enquired, in reference to Johnny Giles, "how long do we have to suffer this man"? It was a comment that typified much of the media's disposition to the irish player-manager and it is best placed in context by the following statistics. By Eamon Dunphy
AT a time when other team sports are becoming better organised in Ireland, rugby at an international level remains in a state of chaos and indiscipline with inevitable consequences in international championships. Ireland has won just one match in the last two years and we were lucky at that.