John O’Connor’s 77Edenhill!

John S. O’Connor is a Craughwell AC member and for more than the last decade has been quietly producing one of the great treasure troves of Galway sports history on his unmatched Flickr Website. His subjects are mostly athletics – most often road races, but you will find hundreds of albums from other events up there too. All pictures are available free of charge but it would be nice to give credit if you use them.

He mentioned to me once a long time ago the origin of the 77 edenhill name was but I don’t know what it is! We are so grateful to John for all his tireless work across the many years.

John’s interest in Athletics runs deep – he was a fine runner in his day, being a scoring member of the UCG (now NUIG) team that first won the “Green Fox” Varsity Cross Country Trophy and a member of the famous team that won it three times – his IUAA record is below and makes for good reading. John has a sub-2:30 marathon from back when carbon on your shoe meant it needed a good cleaning!! A famously tough competitor he has many other fine results to his credit, including a hugely impressive 51:23 ten-miler at Ballycotton and a 20 minute 4-miler in the famous race where Coe beat Coughlan in Loughrea.

Click on the image below to look at John’s photostream on flickr and lose yourself browsing the many albums, etc – what is your all-time favorite John O’Connor photo..?