Euro gold winner Chris O'Donnell sacrificing individual Olympic hopes for mixed relay glory

With much of the focus on the women's side at the European Athletics Championships, and on his fellow male team-mate, Thomas Barr, it could be easy to let Chris O'Donnell slip under the radar.

It could be his team-player attitude, or being the lead leg, which will always result in an unimpressive split on paper, which meant he wasn't in the full beam of the spotlight in Rome. But O'Donnell had an outstanding championship performance in the Italian capital that should be applauded.

A semi-finalist in the individual 400m event, where he subsequently got disqualified for a lane infringement, running a significant season's best in the heats on no sleep, and lining up again for the men's 4x400m relay was no mean physical feat.

Only Sharlene Mawdsley managed to out-do the Sligo man on the number of 400m races run over the six-day event, but he says it did take a toll.

"That was definitely the quickest week of my life and a part of that was, I got probably two or three nights worth of sleep in that whole week," O'Donnell told RTÉ Sport of the aftermath of winning on the international stage..

"I came back, people were still asking me when I came home if I was wrecked or not ,and I was, 'No, I'm actually absolutely fine'.

"I was still on a high for a few days when I came home, and then to be fair it did hit me a few days later. I ran one race, 46.0, I just was not at my best.

"I picked up a little bit of an illness and I was running through that."

The Sligo native is currently 79th on the Paris ranking list and only the top 48 will make the start line in the Stade de France.

O'Donnell's last chance to qualify will be at Sunday's National Championships at the Morton Stadium in Santry, and he will need the automatic qualification mark of