DAVID UP FOR GOLIATH TASK

0 Comments | Daily Mirror, The; London (UK), Jul 30, 2008 | by CHAEL SCULLY

DAVID Gillick, European champion. It’s a title that he once ran a mile from but now embraces as he prepares for his Olympic Games debut in Beijing.

For such a long time, that gold medal he won indoors in Madrid – announcing himself on the international scene in such dramatic circumstances three years ago – hung heavily around his neck.

Everywhere he went in Dublin, Gillick felt he was being looked at. Judged. He had to get away, and Loughborough University has been the setting for the maturing of this 25-year-old Dubliner.

“I didn’t know how to handle it,” he now recalls. “I was like ‘wow, what just happened?’.

“I wanted to go back to normal and I felt like I couldn’t. Maybe that should have been the time I moved, but how are you meant to know? It’s just one of those things.

I still had a lot going on in Ireland. “I had a girlfriend of three years, I still had my degree to finish and I was thinking everything was rosy. I just wanted to go back to normal, like the week prior to winning the medal and just do my normal stuff.”

Gillick came from nowhere – as far as the general public were concerned – to European champion. He recalls going to the Luas stop on the Monday after his success – the first gold medal for Ireland in a sprinting event in 75 years – and being petrified that he would be noticed.

“I literally came back on Monday from winning the Europeans and I was all over the papers and then I went back to college,” he said.

“I would walk down to the Luas and you would get the odd person saying ‘well done’ which was really weird. I don’t think people really expected it because that was my first year of doing indoors.

I probably didn’t even expect it either which was the harder thing to take.

The following year didn’t go well and he admits that his head was all over the place
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