February 16, 2011
By Staff Reporter
And yet there they stood last Sunday, Ireland’s 4×400-meter relay team, waiting in a Budapest stadium an hour after all competition had ended, hoping against hope that the judges would find a place for them on the third level of the medal podium.
Finally, gloriously, the result came through in their favor. The judges had indeed ruled that the American team, which had beaten them into fourth place, had not affected their final changeover properly and so the bronze medal was theirs. What had been on the whole a disappointing week for the Irish athletics team was transformed.
The Irish team, comprising David McCarthy, David Gillick, Gary Ryan and Robert Daly, had run 3:10.44, well-beaten by the winning Jamaican team, which clocked in at 3:05.21. In qualifying for the final earlier in the day, the four had run an Irish-record 3:08.83.
The final had been an unusually rambunctious affair, first the Bahamas and then later the Americans running into trouble and hitting the floor. Ireland ran a tactically excellent race, staying well clear of all the trouble and leaving themselves in a position where the anchor leg runner David McCarthy had a decent chance of running himself into an unimagined top-five finish.
Then, as they came around for the final changeover, the Americans dropped the baton. Joe Mendel, running the penultimate leg for America, tried three times to place it into the hand of Godfrey Herring. As the third attempt failed, he lost his footing and hit the deck, spilling the baton from his hand. Had he picked it up and handed it to Herring, all would have been well and the bronze medal would have been hanging around USA necks. Instead, since Herring picked it up off the floor himself, the USA were disqualified. The bronze medals hung instead around the necks of McCarthy, Gillick, Ryan and Daly.