Tori Pena is smiling again after the shock of her failure at the Olympics, as she tells John O’Brien.
IT was the first week of June and the business end of summer was fast approaching. Tori Pena cast a weather eye over the coming months, the World Championships looming large in the distance. The career-best she’d achieved at a meet in San Diego a year previously guaranteed her the B standard qualification mark, but that bothered her now. Would it be enough to book her a plane ticket to Moscow? Could she afford to take the chance? For sure, the B standard had been good to her in the past when she was a raw recruit to the Irish athletics scene, the bracing novelty of a pole vaulter with serious championship ambitions. It had brought her to the European Championships in Barcelona in 2010 and to the Worlds in South Korea a year later, harsh, eye-opening experiences that gave her a glimpse of life in the big league and sharpened her appetite for more. Just recently she turned 26, though. A seasoned campaigner now. Not in need of soft landings anymore and not inclined to seek them. “I’ve been to Europeans and Worlds on B standards before and it was the right decision at the time,” she says in her soft Californian tones. “But now I’d only want to go with an A standard. I wouldn’t have felt good about myself. The way I was thinking, the B standard wasn’t an option this time.” more at independent.ie
