John Treacy - Career

Career

Treacy attended St Anne's Post-Primary School in Cappoquin, Co. Waterford, famously running the 12 km to school every morning, and later graduated from Providence College. In 1978 and 1979 he won the IAAF World Cross Country Championships in Glasgow and Limerick respectively.

At the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles he won a silver medal in the marathon, placing Ireland 33rd on the medals table.

Treacy was known as a tenacious runner who did not have a particularly sharp final kick in the track races. He did occasionally suffer also from bad luck, however. In the 1978 European Athletics Championships in Prague, then Czechoslovakia, he placed 11th in the fast 10,000-metre race and fourth in the slow and tactical 5,000-metre race, losing to the winner, Italy's Venanzio Ortis, by just three tenths of a second. In the 5,000-metre final, he may have lost the chance of a medal by lingering behind Great Britain's Nick Rose on the final back straight, just after Rose had dropped from the lead group.

In the 1980 Moscow Olympics, he collapsed in his 10,000-metre heat with over 200 metres left, a victim of heat paralysis and dehydration. Because Treacy was running in fourth place when he collapsed and because only the top four runners qualified directly for the final from the three heats, his collapse helped Finland's famous four-time Olympic champion Lasse Virén to qualify directly for the final. Having recovered from his heat-induced collapse, Treacy placed seventh in the 5,000-metre final of those Olympics.

In the 1983 World Athletics Championships in Helsinki, Finland, Treacy was eliminated in the 10,000-metre heats.

In the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, he first placed ninth in the 10,000-metre final before crowning his athletics career with the silver medal won in the men's marathon. Carlos Lopes of Portugal was largely unchallenged for much of the race, with Treacy down the field until entering the top six around the 20-kilometre mark. The Irish athlete continued to work his way up the rankings until entering the LA Coliseum stadium just behind second-placed British athlete Charlie Spedding. Treacy overtook Spedding with 150m to go, and the Irish television commentary of Jimmy Magee went down in history, listing the previous Irish Olympic medal winners up to that time, before culminating: "And for the 13th time, an Olympic medal goes to John Treacy from Villierstown in Waterford, the little man with the big heart."

After the Los Angeles Olympics, Treacy still ran competitively until 1995, retiring following a road race held in his honour in Waterford, attended by the other two medalists from the 1984 Olympic marathon, Carlos Lopes and Charlie Spedding. While he did not win any more major international championships medals, Treacy did win the 1992 Los Angeles Marathon. In the 1986 European Athletics Championships in Stuttgart, then West Germany, he placed sixth in the 10,000-metre race. In the 1987 World Athletics Championships in Rome, he placed twenty-sixth in the 10,000-metre race and thirteenth in the 5,000-metre final.

He is currently chief executive of the Irish Sports Council. He is married to Fionnuala and they have four children, Caoimhe and Deirdre, Sean and Conor.