OPINION | Expect the unexpected at carnival time

Sometimes we are drawn by an established star - a Danny Clark - who on his home patch rarely failed to deliver.

There can also be a mini-series where a talent emerges to world class over several years - as we saw with Amy Cure and now get to experience with the King of King Island, Stewart McSweyn.

And then there are the one-off moments we perhaps didn't see coming. For many Tasmanians, this even includes Cathy Freeman's appearance at the Devonport Carnival in 1993 when she won the women's 400m gift from scratch.

She had already won a Commonwealth Games relay medal in Auckland four years earlier at 16 and had been to the Barcelona Olympics but for much of the public, Cathy was still flying well below the radar.

Few, who were there banging the tin fence with all their might, could now forget that barnstorming finish.

It was an awakening for Carnival fans and the perfect segue in terms of familiarity when half a year later, Cathy took that magnificent double at the next Commonwealth Games in Victoria, Canada. She was very much the girl who had run at Devonport.

We might very well now be in a similar situation. At West Park two New Year's eves ago, a completely unknown Queenslander, Ash Moloney, learned how to run a gift race in a day and took out the Burnie Gift in slashing style.

He was 18 and had never run on grass or in long spikes until his first pro outing at Latrobe a few days earlier. There he slipped in one race and tripped in the next.

By Burnie, the fast learner was on his way - though he thought the headwinds would cruel his chances of running fast enough until it was explained to him that a slower race would give him more time to catch those in front of him.

So unfamiliar with the whole thing was Moloney that he did not realise until after his semi that there was prizemoney up for grabs. He was here for all the right reasons - to expand his horizons in athletics.

He had been invited to Tasmania because he had that year won the world under 20 decathlon in Tampere in Finland, with a new championships record score.

Last weekend in Brisbane, Moloney took the next big step in his precocious career. He set a new Australian record of 8492 points for the decathlon bettering by two points Jagan Hames' previous mark, which he had set winning the 1998 Commonwealth Games in Kuala Lumpur. Perhaps, apart from that achievement in itself, the significance of such a score means little to most. But there is more that easily puts this into context.

As it happened last weekend, world record holder Frenchman Kevin Mayer was also competing in his first decathlon for the year at the same time - on the other side of the Indian Ocean in La Reunion.

Impressed by the news of the young Moloney's massive first day total of 4613 points - the 12th best ever - Mayer undertook to redress the imbalance on day two.

He managed to do so - but only just - finishing with a total of 8552 - just 60 points better than the score of his Australian rival, eight years his junior.

They finished a statistically challenged year as world number one and two - both importantly achieving their aim of qualifying for the Olympic Games.

Perhaps an even more telling comparison is to look at where Mayer was at when he was Moloney's age. He was no late starter having also been the world under 20 champion when he was 18.

At 20, Mayer's best score was 8091 and did not progress beyond where Moloney is now until he was 22. In the constituent individual events at that age, Mayer was superior only in three of the 10.

In the decathlon, if the injury and illness gods are kind to an athlete, he has time.

Right now, Moloney is fast compared with his rivals. His 400m time last Saturday has been bettered by only two other decathletes in the event's 100 year plus history. On times, he should be a member of both the Australia 4x100m and 4x400m relays.

The challenge for Moloney is to get stronger and better at the technical events like pole vault. But the chances are he will be a superstar - and those who were at Burnie in 2018 will be able to recall they witnessed a significant awakening.