Winter Olympics: ‘Anxiety was crazy’ – Farrell Treacy recalls fraught road to Beijing start line

Farrell Treacy revealed he overcame “crazy anxiety” to reach the short-track start line in Beijing after testing positive for coronavirus in mid-January as he feared his hopes of reaching a second Olympic Games were over.

Treacy finished last in his four-man 1,000m heat at the Capital Indoor Arena after a torrid build-up which included an enforced 10 days of isolation following his diagnosis midway through a training camp in Salt Lake City.

“I got Covid before I came and obviously with the Covid protocols in China it was looking very unlikely that I was even going to be here,” said the 26-year-old Treacy, who made his Games debut in Pyeongchang in 2018.

“Ten days of isolation is not fantastic when you’ve got the Games, and I only came out here on Tuesday. Even before then I was having Covid tests every day to try to get negatives.”

All British athletes underwent at least five PCR tests prior to travel and had their CT values – which monitor the precise level of Covid in the system – closely monitored. Chinese authorities lowered the negative threshold from 40 to 35 in the build-up to the Games.

“The protocol was ever-changing. At one point we reached a day where they were telling me, ‘no, it’s not going to happen’, and then the next day things changed. And then I got my negatives through. The anxiety was crazy.”

Worse for Treacy, his hopes of muscling in on one of the qualifying berths in his heat were effectively dashed when he made his move for the line one lap too early after mistakenly believing he had heard the bell.

“I thought I heard the bell and I went to the line too early,” added Treacy. “It’s never happened before, so to happen at a Games is not fantastic. I don’t know if it’s a massive lapse of judgement or