Brian Fay reacts to his 13th-place finish in Paris. Morgan Treacy / INPHO
Morgan Treacy / INPHO / INPHO
BENEATH THE MILKY sun of another Paris morning at the Olympic Games, Brian Fay speaks defiantly in the face of his disappointment.
“I just need to keep showing up and I’ll get it right eventually. By hell or high water I’m gonna fucking make a world final, its going to fucking happen. If I keep falling on my arse, so be it. But I’ll just keep showing up.”
Fay’s world final hasn’t come at his debut Olympic Games: he has just finished 13th in his heat of the 5,000km, five places outside of the qualifying spots for the final. On his arse.
He decides to hang around for the final three days later, where Jakob Ingebrigtsen coasts home for a gold to atone for his fumble in the 1500m final four days earlier.
Fay is heartened by what he sees.
I feel like I should be here, he thinks. I’m as good as any of these guys.
“I never want to be in that situation again”, Fay tells The 42. “‘Yeah, they’re better than me now, but I think I’m as good as them or I will be as good as them, and that’s a tangible thing to achieve.”
Now he’s showing up again.
**********
Fay is speaking to us from Australia, where he has moved to work full-time with coach Nic Bideau, who is perhaps best known in Ireland as Sonia O’Sullivan’s husband. The switch has meant a split with his long-term Irish-based coach, Feidhlim Kelly.
“I just had to make the move and go into the unknown,” he says, “and put myself out there to try and reach another level.”
Kelly has been integral to Fay’s running career. Hailing from Glasnevin and enrolling in DCU meant Fay merely had to walk to college, at a time his mother was sceptical of the notion of pursuing a career in athletics. In the mornings, Fay would put on his running kit and then pull on his normal clothes before tucking a notepad under his arm as he walked out, telling his mother he was walking up to college. Kelly would be parked around the corner to whisk Fay to training in Maynooth.
“I was very driven as a person to be good at running and my mother didn’t understand it,” says Fay, “She wanted me to just be focused on my college degree.”
Whereas a college degree would give Fay a career, running had given him an identity.
He is a quadruplet, and says his early identity was tangled with those of his brother and two sisters. They went to a small primary school, where the Fay quadruplets were four among a class of 30; Brian and his brother Michael were two of only 13 boys. “It meant Michael’s friends were my friends, just by default.”
Their divergence began in secondary school: though both went to Belvedere College, their mum made sure they were put into separate classes. Brian says he was the sporty one, though the eminence afforded to rugby in Belvedere didn’t suit his slight build. He tried all manner of sports – Gaelic football, basketball, cricket – along with Irish dancing, school plays and musicals before finally finding his little fragment of the world: running.
“When everyone’s in school, you’re always struggling to find your identity,” he says, “You’re low on confidence, and you’re trying to find your way and you’re trying to figure out who you are.
“I was in an all boys school and the main sport was rugby: it’s a very macho environment and being a small fella, I probably wasn’t the most macho guy out there. Running, I just latched on to.”
Ronan Duggan coached athletics at Belvedere and persuaded Fay to run an 800m. Fay broke two minutes. “It’s not a big thing at all,” he says, “but for my self-esteem at the time, it was probably my most important result ever.”
The dominoes fell from there. He targeted an All-Ireland steeplechase title in his final year in school and won it, and he continued running at DCU. He became the youngest Irishman to break the four-minute barrier for the mile when he was 19, and earned a scholarship to the University of Washington in Seattle, where he won All-American honours on the NCAA circuit and finished ninth in the 5,000m at his final NCAA outdoor championship.
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Fay’s collegiate highlight was at the pleasingly-named Brian Klay invitational race in April 2022, where he somehow overhauled a 30-metre gap on the final lap of the 5000m, surging home to win in 13:16.52, the sixth-fastest time in NCAA history.
His parents were at this stage on board with his athletics career, watching him finish 10th at the European cross-country championships in 2021.
Fay in cross-country action, in 2023. Morgan Treacy / INPHO
Morgan Treacy / INPHO / INPHO
Fay turned pro after college: he hired Bideau as his agent and signed a contract with Nike. Professionalism, especially in Ireland, is freighted with all kinds of false glamour. The facilities at his university were much better than anything in Ireland, while all of his needs were looked after in America: travel, food, accommodation booking, doctor’s visits, physio, scans. As a pro in Ireland, you’re pretty much on your own.
“There’s no one here to wipe your arse,” he says.
Immediately after finishing college, Fay spent a few weeks training at altitude in Spain, from where he and Feidhlim Kelly went to Belgium for a meet in Heusden. Fay ran the 5,000m and went off hard, pouring all of himself onto the track while waiting for the pop.
“When you’re at altitude and you’re selling yourself, you eventually pop: your breathing is gone, your legs are gone. I was just waiting for this pop to happen as the race was going, and it never really came. So I just kept going.
“I remember with a kilometre to run, I started paying attention to the clock and I was like, ‘I’m actually fucking flying here, this is good.’ I just needed to focus for a lap and a half because I always have a good last lap.
“And I was just thinking, I could get a national record here, 13.03. Then I absolutely gunned it.”
Fay crossed in 13:01.40 – a new Irish record in the 5,000m and within the standard time for the world championships and Olympic Games.
“I just started screaming. This is not exactly a Diamond League track or anything like that, it’s a fairly quiet, ambient type of atmosphere. There’s me jumping up and down like a hooligan, and my coach jumping up and down and he’s grabbing me and I’m jumping up, I’m ripping my number off.
“I’d say everyone else is like, who are these shower of cowboys here?”
Fay went to the national championships at Morton Stadium a fortnight later and won the 5000m title.
“I remember sitting there with the drug tester, and there’s kids coming up and saying ‘Good job’ and you’re soaking it in. ‘Man, I know it’s only nationals but this is as good as it gets. Everyone knows who you are, you won a national title.’
First he knew himself as Brian Fay the Runner. Now everyone else did too.
**********
One issue: professional sport is a precarious substrate for anyone’s identity.
“I feel like most young athletes probably go through it,” says Fay. “You take to the start line and you think your whole identity is wrapped up in how you perform, and you worry about those things.
“You’re chasing like this idea of trying to be a professional athlete and trying to sign a contract and get to the next level and make the Olympics and it was probably all a little bit too overwhelming for me. Every time I went to the start line, it was like, ‘What if I don’t run well? What if I am not a good runner? What do I have? What do I fall back on?’”
Fay suffers from anxiety on a daily basis, and he admits an acute phase almost knocked him out of the sport. He developed a phobia of not sleeping before races, which became a vicious circle of sleepless nights. He went to Sweden for the U23 European Championships in 2019 with a medal shot in the steeplechase, but says he couldn’t sleep for four of his six nights at the event.
He found a way through the heat but finished 11th in the final. Rather than take a step back, he kept racing. The sleeplessness, in his own words, “habitualised”, and he says he didn’t sleep before any of his sessions for about a year.
“You have nights of just being an insomniac, and you’re trying to run 160km a week, so it wasn’t great.
“Eventually I’d have panic attack after panic attack, then I’d fall asleep at five and get up at seven or eight to train. It wasn’t healthy at all.
“I remember coming to National cross-country in November and I just couldn’t . . . it was such a big demon for me. I couldn’t go to sleep. I was bawling my eyes out to my mother. I went to bed that thinking I wasn’t racing in the morning. Then I got up and came second. That was a confidence boost. ‘Jeez, I’m awfully hard on myself here. I’m not a terrible runner, I just need to chill out and take a step back.’”
Fay running the steeplechase in 2021. Bryan Keane / INPHO
Bryan Keane / INPHO / INPHO
Covid forced that step back. Fay continued to train alone within the permitted radius of his home in Glasnevin, but now freed from competition and training schedules, he could do so according to his own schedule, and without pressure. He used the extra time to speak over Zoom with people about his troubles, and says it allowed him some more breathing space.
“I could focus on myself, rethink, and realign my mind.
“I wouldn’t say I have got over it, because I feel anxiety is something I will deal with on and off for the rest of my life.
“You just have to accept, ‘Look, I’m a runner irrespective of my performances being good or bad, and I commit to the process and lifestyle of being a runner’.”
Fay had no issues sleeping ahead of the Olympics in Paris, though he still suffers from pre-race nerves: he had to eat breakfast twice on the morning of his heat in Paris as he was quickly reacquainted with his first effort.
He has also been forced into perspective, and to see his athletics career as merely one part of something far greater. When Fay was on scholarship in America, his father John was diagnosed with cancer.
“When he got diagnosed with cancer, initially he got a very bad prognosis in terms of his lifespan”, says Fay. “One of the first things he asked was, ‘My son’s looking to qualify for the Olympics. Am I going to be alive to see it?’”
Fay says his father is recovering now and doing well, and, sure enough, was one of 40 members of the Fay family to fly to Paris to watch Brian in action.
“I felt like me running at the Olympics was more than just me running the Olympics”, he says, “certainly from my dad and my family.”
**********
In Paris, Fay says he “ran as well as he was going to.” If 2023 was his breakout year, 2024 became a difficult second album. He was poor at the European Championships in Rome a couple of months before the Olympics, finishing 15th and 28 seconds off his personal best. He did have kick into his trademark strong finish, which only went to earn him some very public criticism from his coach’s wife.
“Brian can finish strong but sure what’s the point when you’re off the bat like that?” said Sonia O’Sullivan on RTÉ’s live TV coverage.
“If he has speed like that he obviously didn’t try hard enough earlier on to go with the pack when they broke. Brian is very good in a consistent race when they are running consistent laps the whole way, but this race was a typical championship race where they start off slow and it’s messy, and their pace is up and down.”
“Obviously it’s not nice to be criticised”, says Fay, “but you accept that you’re in a position where criticism is a privilege: these people are criticising you because they believe you can do better.”
He has, he admits, raised Sonia’s comments with Nic. You travel to the other side of the world to discover just how small the world can be.
Sonia’s criticism may have stung but it’s accurate, and Fay has moved to Australia to address it. Some athletics coaches in Ireland believe Fay has the talent to medal at European level and make a world final: if he can stick the pace to the final lap, his ferocious kick will make him competitive with the vast majority of the 5000m field.
“You have to just go with the pace and try to hold on, and unfortunately I just wasn’t fit enough to be in the mix this year”, he says.
Becoming that fit, he says, could take years, but Fay is committed to it. He is running around 160km a week at altitude at the moment, and tells me he clocked just under 6,500km across 2024.
“To put myself in the mix with some of the best guys in the world, it’s going to take me a couple of years more training, of hard work, of months and months of just putting down training. I accept it’s a long process, and I am willing to commit to that long process.”
Don’t worry about where you want to get to – just keep putting one foot in front of the other.
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'What if I don't run well? What if I am not a good runner?'
BENEATH THE MILKY sun of another Paris morning at the Olympic Games, Brian Fay speaks defiantly in the face of his disappointment.
“I just need to keep showing up and I’ll get it right eventually. By hell or high water I’m gonna fucking make a world final, its going to fucking happen. If I keep falling on my arse, so be it. But I’ll just keep showing up.”
Fay’s world final hasn’t come at his debut Olympic Games: he has just finished 13th in his heat of the 5,000km, five places outside of the qualifying spots for the final. On his arse.
He decides to hang around for the final three days later, where Jakob Ingebrigtsen coasts home for a gold to atone for his fumble in the 1500m final four days earlier.
Fay is heartened by what he sees.
I feel like I should be here, he thinks. I’m as good as any of these guys.
“I never want to be in that situation again”, Fay tells The 42. “‘Yeah, they’re better than me now, but I think I’m as good as them or I will be as good as them, and that’s a tangible thing to achieve.”
Now he’s showing up again.
**********
Fay is speaking to us from Australia, where he has moved to work full-time with coach Nic Bideau, who is perhaps best known in Ireland as Sonia O’Sullivan’s husband. The switch has meant a split with his long-term Irish-based coach, Feidhlim Kelly.
“I just had to make the move and go into the unknown,” he says, “and put myself out there to try and reach another level.”
Kelly has been integral to Fay’s running career. Hailing from Glasnevin and enrolling in DCU meant Fay merely had to walk to college, at a time his mother was sceptical of the notion of pursuing a career in athletics. In the mornings, Fay would put on his running kit and then pull on his normal clothes before tucking a notepad under his arm as he walked out, telling his mother he was walking up to college. Kelly would be parked around the corner to whisk Fay to training in Maynooth.
“I was very driven as a person to be good at running and my mother didn’t understand it,” says Fay, “She wanted me to just be focused on my college degree.”
Whereas a college degree would give Fay a career, running had given him an identity.
He is a quadruplet, and says his early identity was tangled with those of his brother and two sisters. They went to a small primary school, where the Fay quadruplets were four among a class of 30; Brian and his brother Michael were two of only 13 boys. “It meant Michael’s friends were my friends, just by default.”
Their divergence began in secondary school: though both went to Belvedere College, their mum made sure they were put into separate classes. Brian says he was the sporty one, though the eminence afforded to rugby in Belvedere didn’t suit his slight build. He tried all manner of sports – Gaelic football, basketball, cricket – along with Irish dancing, school plays and musicals before finally finding his little fragment of the world: running.
“When everyone’s in school, you’re always struggling to find your identity,” he says, “You’re low on confidence, and you’re trying to find your way and you’re trying to figure out who you are.
“I was in an all boys school and the main sport was rugby: it’s a very macho environment and being a small fella, I probably wasn’t the most macho guy out there. Running, I just latched on to.”
Ronan Duggan coached athletics at Belvedere and persuaded Fay to run an 800m. Fay broke two minutes. “It’s not a big thing at all,” he says, “but for my self-esteem at the time, it was probably my most important result ever.”
The dominoes fell from there. He targeted an All-Ireland steeplechase title in his final year in school and won it, and he continued running at DCU. He became the youngest Irishman to break the four-minute barrier for the mile when he was 19, and earned a scholarship to the University of Washington in Seattle, where he won All-American honours on the NCAA circuit and finished ninth in the 5,000m at his final NCAA outdoor championship.
Fay’s collegiate highlight was at the pleasingly-named Brian Klay invitational race in April 2022, where he somehow overhauled a 30-metre gap on the final lap of the 5000m, surging home to win in 13:16.52, the sixth-fastest time in NCAA history.
His parents were at this stage on board with his athletics career, watching him finish 10th at the European cross-country championships in 2021.
Fay turned pro after college: he hired Bideau as his agent and signed a contract with Nike. Professionalism, especially in Ireland, is freighted with all kinds of false glamour. The facilities at his university were much better than anything in Ireland, while all of his needs were looked after in America: travel, food, accommodation booking, doctor’s visits, physio, scans. As a pro in Ireland, you’re pretty much on your own.
“There’s no one here to wipe your arse,” he says.
Immediately after finishing college, Fay spent a few weeks training at altitude in Spain, from where he and Feidhlim Kelly went to Belgium for a meet in Heusden. Fay ran the 5,000m and went off hard, pouring all of himself onto the track while waiting for the pop.
“When you’re at altitude and you’re selling yourself, you eventually pop: your breathing is gone, your legs are gone. I was just waiting for this pop to happen as the race was going, and it never really came. So I just kept going.
“I remember with a kilometre to run, I started paying attention to the clock and I was like, ‘I’m actually fucking flying here, this is good.’ I just needed to focus for a lap and a half because I always have a good last lap.
“And I was just thinking, I could get a national record here, 13.03. Then I absolutely gunned it.”
Fay crossed in 13:01.40 – a new Irish record in the 5,000m and within the standard time for the world championships and Olympic Games.
“I just started screaming. This is not exactly a Diamond League track or anything like that, it’s a fairly quiet, ambient type of atmosphere. There’s me jumping up and down like a hooligan, and my coach jumping up and down and he’s grabbing me and I’m jumping up, I’m ripping my number off.
“I’d say everyone else is like, who are these shower of cowboys here?”
Fay went to the national championships at Morton Stadium a fortnight later and won the 5000m title.
“I remember sitting there with the drug tester, and there’s kids coming up and saying ‘Good job’ and you’re soaking it in. ‘Man, I know it’s only nationals but this is as good as it gets. Everyone knows who you are, you won a national title.’
First he knew himself as Brian Fay the Runner. Now everyone else did too.
**********
One issue: professional sport is a precarious substrate for anyone’s identity.
“I feel like most young athletes probably go through it,” says Fay. “You take to the start line and you think your whole identity is wrapped up in how you perform, and you worry about those things.
“You’re chasing like this idea of trying to be a professional athlete and trying to sign a contract and get to the next level and make the Olympics and it was probably all a little bit too overwhelming for me. Every time I went to the start line, it was like, ‘What if I don’t run well? What if I am not a good runner? What do I have? What do I fall back on?’”
Fay suffers from anxiety on a daily basis, and he admits an acute phase almost knocked him out of the sport. He developed a phobia of not sleeping before races, which became a vicious circle of sleepless nights. He went to Sweden for the U23 European Championships in 2019 with a medal shot in the steeplechase, but says he couldn’t sleep for four of his six nights at the event.
He found a way through the heat but finished 11th in the final. Rather than take a step back, he kept racing. The sleeplessness, in his own words, “habitualised”, and he says he didn’t sleep before any of his sessions for about a year.
“You have nights of just being an insomniac, and you’re trying to run 160km a week, so it wasn’t great.
“Eventually I’d have panic attack after panic attack, then I’d fall asleep at five and get up at seven or eight to train. It wasn’t healthy at all.
“I remember coming to National cross-country in November and I just couldn’t . . . it was such a big demon for me. I couldn’t go to sleep. I was bawling my eyes out to my mother. I went to bed that thinking I wasn’t racing in the morning. Then I got up and came second. That was a confidence boost. ‘Jeez, I’m awfully hard on myself here. I’m not a terrible runner, I just need to chill out and take a step back.’”
Covid forced that step back. Fay continued to train alone within the permitted radius of his home in Glasnevin, but now freed from competition and training schedules, he could do so according to his own schedule, and without pressure. He used the extra time to speak over Zoom with people about his troubles, and says it allowed him some more breathing space.
“I could focus on myself, rethink, and realign my mind.
“I wouldn’t say I have got over it, because I feel anxiety is something I will deal with on and off for the rest of my life.
“You just have to accept, ‘Look, I’m a runner irrespective of my performances being good or bad, and I commit to the process and lifestyle of being a runner’.”
Fay had no issues sleeping ahead of the Olympics in Paris, though he still suffers from pre-race nerves: he had to eat breakfast twice on the morning of his heat in Paris as he was quickly reacquainted with his first effort.
He has also been forced into perspective, and to see his athletics career as merely one part of something far greater. When Fay was on scholarship in America, his father John was diagnosed with cancer.
“When he got diagnosed with cancer, initially he got a very bad prognosis in terms of his lifespan”, says Fay. “One of the first things he asked was, ‘My son’s looking to qualify for the Olympics. Am I going to be alive to see it?’”
Fay says his father is recovering now and doing well, and, sure enough, was one of 40 members of the Fay family to fly to Paris to watch Brian in action.
“I felt like me running at the Olympics was more than just me running the Olympics”, he says, “certainly from my dad and my family.”
**********
In Paris, Fay says he “ran as well as he was going to.” If 2023 was his breakout year, 2024 became a difficult second album. He was poor at the European Championships in Rome a couple of months before the Olympics, finishing 15th and 28 seconds off his personal best. He did have kick into his trademark strong finish, which only went to earn him some very public criticism from his coach’s wife.
“Brian can finish strong but sure what’s the point when you’re off the bat like that?” said Sonia O’Sullivan on RTÉ’s live TV coverage.
“If he has speed like that he obviously didn’t try hard enough earlier on to go with the pack when they broke. Brian is very good in a consistent race when they are running consistent laps the whole way, but this race was a typical championship race where they start off slow and it’s messy, and their pace is up and down.”
“Obviously it’s not nice to be criticised”, says Fay, “but you accept that you’re in a position where criticism is a privilege: these people are criticising you because they believe you can do better.”
He has, he admits, raised Sonia’s comments with Nic. You travel to the other side of the world to discover just how small the world can be.
Sonia’s criticism may have stung but it’s accurate, and Fay has moved to Australia to address it. Some athletics coaches in Ireland believe Fay has the talent to medal at European level and make a world final: if he can stick the pace to the final lap, his ferocious kick will make him competitive with the vast majority of the 5000m field.
“You have to just go with the pace and try to hold on, and unfortunately I just wasn’t fit enough to be in the mix this year”, he says.
Becoming that fit, he says, could take years, but Fay is committed to it. He is running around 160km a week at altitude at the moment, and tells me he clocked just under 6,500km across 2024.
“To put myself in the mix with some of the best guys in the world, it’s going to take me a couple of years more training, of hard work, of months and months of just putting down training. I accept it’s a long process, and I am willing to commit to that long process.”
Don’t worry about where you want to get to – just keep putting one foot in front of the other.
To embed this post, copy the code below on your site
2024 Olympics Athletics Brian fay olympic reflections