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After winning the 10,000m world title at Tokyo in 1991, Liz McColgan set
her sights on repeating that achievement at the following year's Olympic
Games in Barcelona. Liz did not run a competitive 10,000m on the track
prior to Barcelona, preferring to concentrate her preparation on racing
at shorter distances. This included winning the UK 3,000m title at
Sheffield in June, and a win over 5,000m at the Bislett Games in Oslo on 4
July. In the Olympic 10,000m final on 7 August, McColgan set a fast
pace for the first 6km, but she hadn't broken the field up as she had in
Tokyo the year before, and a number of others passed her in the closing
stages, with Liz gallantly holding on to gain 5th place. McColgan
concentrated on road racing over the next two years, although she lost a
lot of time due to injury during that period.
She returned to the
track during the 1995 season, setting a new personal best of 14min
59.56sec over 5,000m at Hechtel on 22 July. However, although Liz's
performances on the track were not significantly slower than they were
in her heyday, it had more become the case that the rest of the world
had caught her up and passed her by. In the World Championships in
Gothenburg on 9 August, Liz characteristically set the early pace in the
10,000m final, before control of the race was taken over by some of her
much younger opponents, who eventuall.y relegated McColgan to sixth
place, finishing half a lap behind the winner. After that experience,
McColgan returned solely to road racing, which included a win in the
1996 London marathon on 21 April in 2hr 27min 54sec. On 28 July that
year, she made her final Olympic appearance (see photo above) at Atlanta, where she finished 16th in the marathon. (Ron Casey)
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