best foot FORWARD

A miserable, damp and dreary Tuesday afternoon in Santry Stadium. The track is empty, except for the lone figure of Susan Smith, the Irish 400 metres hurdler who has emerged this season as one of the new stars of the event internationally, going through her training routine. It s in moments like this that you realise the supreme dedication required to become a contender.
At last, however, at 25 years of age, that s precisely what Susan Smith is, as her sixth place in the recent World Championships confirms.
Now Susan has just one objective in mind. To go even faster . . .
Waterford-born and raised, Susan developed a love for running at the tender age of seven. She worked her way up through the Community Games, schools championships, going on to compete in junior and eventually senior championships at national level.
Having finished school, she travelled across the Atlantic, to Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, an Ivy League college, from which she graduated in 1993. She then worked full-time for a year with Coopers & Lybrand as a financial analyst, before gradually decreasing her conventional working hours to concentrate on training. She recently announced a sponsorship with TNT, which will allow her to concentrate solely on her running for the next four years, freeing her up to focus completely on the next Olympic Games in Sydney in 2000. Combined with her World Championship performances, it s a major breakthrough for her.
The sponsorship is brilliant, she gushes. It will allow me to train full-time until the next Olympics. It s going to be totally vital to my progress. It s given me the opportunity to excel. It s definitely something I need, to see if I can do it.
Susan realised at an early age that running would be more than just a hobby for her. It s funny, because ever since I was seven, athletics was my whole life. I sacrificed a lot, I think, with regard to going out when I was in my teens. I went out a little bit, but not very much at all. Training was always number one, so I think I always knew that it was there. It just took a while to come.
Susan had excelled at Juvenile level, at 100m and 80m hurdles, winning the British Championship and performing very well at European and World Junior events, but for some time it seemed that she was unlikely to capitalise on that early promise.
It took me a while to make the progression to the senior ranks, because it s a totally different ballgame, she admits. You are competing against much stronger, older people. I think I am a late developer as far as running goes. I think I am only ready to start running really fast times in my mid-20s.
Susan has simple advice for any young athletes who are thinking of taking the same route as she herself.
Enjoy it, she says. Young kids don t need to put themselves into a position where they are concentrating on one event. They are way too young to be doing that. I didn t start 400m hurdles until last year. If you re still enjoying it when you re 18, then is the time to think about concentrating on one or two specialist events.
Are some athletes introduced to the notion of being competitive too early?
I think competitiveness is an inner thing. If they want to be competitive, they will be competitive. I think it s brilliant that we have clubs all over the country and that young kids are being encouraged to run. But I don t think you can teach someone to be competitive.
A lot of kids dream about becoming world class sports stars, but does the reality live up to the ideals of youth or is it ultimately more difficult and more draining than you can imagine?
Well, I think I still have a long way to go before I am a top class sports star, she smiles shyly. But it is incredible to be able to run in all these races. It was great to do so well in the Olympics and the World Championships.
That kind of experience makes it worth all those years of training. It is very, very hard work. Not everybody gets satisfaction from it, and you certainly don t get it every time you step onto the track there are so many hard days but it s worth it. Someone like Michelle or Sonia would agree, I m sure, because they have the medals to show for it. Hopefully I ll get there some day.
There is a lot of talk about the pressures and stress that modern athletes experience. Sonia O Sullivan s experiences notwithstanding, Susan dismisses this as a factor.
I don t run for anybody else, I run for myself, she insists. Obviously I run for Ireland when I m out on the track as well, but it comes from within. So any pressures are pressures from me. Sometimes you don t want to go training because it s a miserable day or something, but you just think, This is what I do now. This is my job . You can t just not go to work one day. Once you get out on the track, it s grand.
Maybe as I get faster and better, and as people know who I am more, the pressure might be more intense, but it s not at the moment.
Is the isolation and the self-immersion which goes with the territory not a potential problem in itself?
You have to give yourself completely, she agrees. But it s the same with everything you do if you want to be the best at something, you have to devote yourself entirely to it.
Yeah, you have another life, of course. My whole day isn t the track or the 400m lane. When you come to the track, you train, and when it is over you have to forget about it. When you have a horrible training session you can t be killing yourself over it for the rest of the day. You have to be able to switch on and off. But it is a very selfish sport because it s an individual sport.
I think it s sad if people don t enjoy being at the top level of sport, she adds. Obviously there are different pressures on the top, top people like Donovan Bailey or Linford Christie. They have incredible expectations, but they have to deal with them.
Susan admits to being extremely ambitious.
I know what I can run and I haven t achieved that yet, she says confidently. It s going to take a few more years of hard work, but hopefully by the next Olympics in the year 2000, I ll be running as fast as I can. And that means running very fast, she says with a laugh.
Does she see herself challenging for gold?
Yeah, is the quiet but immediate answer.
Does the sort of dedication it takes to make it to the very top in the athletics field make having a personal life difficult?
This is my life, she says, surveying the track below us, and so my personal life revolves around my athletics. I haven t really gone out much all summer, maybe a couple of times, but that s fine with me. Once the season is over, I ll be on a break for about a month, and I m sure I ll make up for all the times I didn t go out.
During the year, I go out but I won t stay out too late and I won t drink or anything like that, because this is what I do now. That s my life and that s the way I want it.
How does she feel about the fact that so many athletes tend to have relationships with others in the game?
There are certainly a lot of athlete-to-athlete relationships, but I don t think I would want to be in one of those. I think it would be very hard because sometimes one person is up and another is down, so for me, it s great that Ryan [her new husband] is not involved.
What about diet does she have to measure everything she consumes?
No, she says immediately. I watch what I eat and I eat healthily but I don t measure every little thing. I m not obsessive at all. Certainly, I like my chocolate and I will eat chocolate but it s not an obsessive thing.
Conditions like anorexia are not the sole concern of supermodels and can be a problem in the athletics field too, but Smith feels that these are more of a danger to distance runners than sprinters. Distance runners put in so many miles that their bodies burn off fat, so they re really skinny. You don t find many skinny sprinters.
Smith refuses to be drawn on the subject of other athletes. She has no idea what could be behind fellow athlete Sonia O Sullivan s recent collapse in form.
Minister for Sport, James McDaid recently called for a very stringent system of drugs testing for Irish athletes, involving blood tests. This, he felt, would offer a simple and effective method of eliminating the problem of drug use in Irish sport, setting Ireland up as an example for the rest of the world to follow.
Susan Smith would welcome the initiative: If it is an effective way of drug-testing, that is fine by me. Any form of drug testing is fine as long as the cheats are caught. I think anybody who tests positive for drugs deserves punishment. It s as simple as that.
Does she think that it would have the support of Irish athletes in general?
The principle of blood-testing is that it can detect more things than urine testing so I would imagine so. But I can t speak for other people.
It has been alleged that performance-enhancing drugs are freely available in Irish sport from gyms and from sports doctors. I have never come across anything like that, she states. I wouldn t even know where to look.
On the other side of the coin, Smith feels that the unfounded allegations of drug use in the wake of Michelle Smith s phenomenal achievements in Atlanta were very unfair. She performed an incredible feat. It was such a wonderful achievement, she didn t deserve to have whatever glory was going tainted in the way it was, she says.
Susan loves eating out and, by her own admission, spends a lot of time talking on the phone, but the idea of going on an all-night bender doesn t fit into her agenda. I don t go out on the rant a lot but I go to the cinema and I read a lot.
Susan is also a big music fan. There was a brilliant radio station in Atlanta where I was living called 99X, and I loved what they played. I love Pearl Jam, Smashing Pumpkins, all that kind of music. But you have to be in a certain mood for all that, so I like people like Sarah McLachlan as well.
Does she ever listen to music when she runs?
No, I can t, she says. At one point I tried to get into it but it used to just annoy me.
And with that she s back on the track, doing laps to the soundtrack of her own feet hitting the cinders. In the distance, the sound of the traffic is audible but inside Santry Stadium, Susan Smith is locked into her own alternative universe, training to go faster, running for her life.
The best is yet to come. n