Final-lap pain propelling Darragh McElhinney to greater heights

Back in August, Team Ireland had two representatives in the final of the men's 5000m final at the European Championships in Munich: 22-year-old UCD student and Cork native Darragh McElhinney, and 24-year-old University of Washington's Brian Fay of Raheny Shamrocks.

Earlier in the year, Glengarriff native McElhinney discovered just how difficult the step up from underage sensation to senior athletics would be.

Competing at the World Indoor Championships in Belgrade, his first major senior championships, he finished ninth in his men’s 3000m heat and didn’t qualify for the final.

Now in Munich, among the best of the middle-distance runners in a world-class field, he was holding his own. Much more than that in fact.

As the bell rang for the final lap, after covering earlier breaks, he found himself in eighth place. One hundred metres later, he was up to seventh. Then he simply ran out of juice.

The race was won by the imperious Jakob Ingebrigtsen, with McElhinney losing nine places in the final half lap.

Compatriot Fay was among those to ease past on his way to an eighth-place finish and the best by an Irish man in the event since Mark Carroll in the same stadium 20 years ago.

For McElhinney however, there are no regrets.

"It’s funny, most of the time I kind of beat myself up badly after bad races, and I think if somebody had told me before the race I was going to come 16th, I would have been absolutely fuming with myself," he told RTÉ Sport ahead of the 123.ie national cross-country championships which take place this Sunday in Donegal.

"But to be honest, I just didn’t feel right to be annoyed with myself because the way the race panned out. I did everything I wanted to do. Although it didn’t work out in the end... I was looking