The Kieran Shanon Interview
He doesn’t run as fast or as often as he used to, but still he radiates that sense of a man always up to something, always on the go. He meets us in the Dáil, having whizzed in earlier on his motorbike which he regularly uses to commute to Kildare Street. Normally when he peels off his bike gear it’s to emerge in a smart, sharp suit. Today he’s more casual, wearing waist-30 denim jeans just like he did in his athletic prime, as neither the Seanad nor the Dáil are in session this week, but he still has things to do, mail to check, people to meet.
Before his chat with the Irish Examiner, he meets the CNN golf correspondent Shane O’Donoghue in the Dáil bar about doing MC at a $10,000-a-table, Bill Clinton-in-the-house fundraiser in the States next month for the Children’s Medical Research Foundation, the hospital in Crumlin a cause Coghlan has worked full-time for almost 20 years now.
After our chat he’ll go for a four-mile run in the Phoenix Park. The next day he’ll be back up there coaching a group of middle-distance runners, guiding them along like Gerry Farnan in Dublin and Jumbo Elliott in Villanova used to mentor him all those years ago. As much as he’s enjoying the novelty and challenge of this whole Seanad thing, athletics remains a passion.
It’s what brought him to Kenya last year, a curiosity to learn more how they, and in particular the Irish missionary Brother Colm O’Connell, produce so many world-class runners. That journey of discovery is the subject of a television documentary, Man On A Mission, which will be broadcast on Setanta Sports this coming Monday night at 9.30pm. Seeing the phenomenon up close was an eye-opening experience.
“You see people running everywhere. You could be driving along roads that stretch for miles and miles with nothing all around you only people, running or walking. And you’re wondering, where are they going to? It’s just a way of life. From the time they learn to walk they’re walking and then running these very long distances.”
What struck him was the simplicity. The genius of Brother Colm’s coaching isn’t so much his words but his mere presence, just being there for the athletes. The athletes in his academy run three times a day, six days a week, but it’s all gradual, all organic. The first run at 6am is more a form of meditation than anything in which they jog slowly for 15 minutes and then salute the sun; Brother Colm calls the ritual “feeling the day”.
The second run at 10am on the track might be hard or easy, depending. The 4pm one is again easy enough — for them; just a jog. On their rest day, the Sabbath, they might go for another light run for an hour. Of their 18 or 19 runs a week, three of them are probably full-out; the rest is just ticking over, building up the mileage.
“They just do the simple things right, consistently. Like you rest, you don’t overtrain, you eat properly. They eat this rice-based porridge called ugali for breakfast, lunch and dinner, day after day, week after week, just maybe mixing chicken with it one day and beef the next. They live on a lot of fruit. There’s no such thing as junk food. They haven’t the distractions that western society has. In America and Europe athletic performance has declined while affluence has grown but in Kenya nothing has changed.”
He still thinks they could be beaten by a white man with the right self-belief to go with the right preparation and that bit of luck. “Could,” he emphasises. “Could.”
There was a time when Coghlan had that kind of self-belief. Henry Rono was the top Kenyan middle-distance runner of their era but as Coghlan points out matter-of-factly, Rono never beat him — indoors, outdoors or cross-country. But just like Rono, Coghlan never got to win an Olympic medal. In Rono’s case, it was because the Kenyans boycotted the Games in his era. In Coghlan’s, he didn’t have the right preparation and luck to go with that self-belief.
He doesn’t mind going over those near misses again, simply because he’s not ashamed of them and with it being an Olympic year now, there might be some lessons there for some of our London hopefuls.
Lesson one — stick to what you normally do. The night before the final in Montreal 1976, he shaved his legs because he’d seen swimmers at the Games ‘shave down’ to give themselves an edge. All Coghlan did was give himself bloody nicks all over his legs and waste up two hours of valuable energy. Come the race his focus was taken up too much on those bloody, scratchy legs — and his opponents.
“I got psyched out,” he admits straight out. “The night before the race Gerry Farnan asked me ‘What’s your plan for tomorrow?’ and I said ‘Stay behind [John] Walker’. I didn’t have to say anymore. The morning of the race then Jumbo calls me. I’ll never forget the words. ‘S-s-sso ch-ch-champ, a lot of fast half-milers in this race. Walker, 1.44 for the 800; [Ivo] Van Damme, 1.43; [Ric] Wolhuter, 1.43. If the pace is slow, be careful. Don’t let the pace be too slow’.
“That completely confused me. I’m not blaming Jumbo for the losing of that race because I was the one who ran it but when I went to the warm-up track that day, I looked at [those guys] and it was like ‘Oh, shit, there’s 1.44 over there, 1.43 over there’.”
For the first lap he stayed on Walker’s shoulder but when the split was called out at 62 seconds, Coghlan feared the pace was too slow and moved right up to the front. For the next two laps you could say he was in the lead but in reality he was more Walker’s rabbit. With 300m to go, Walker threw a move he couldn’t hold off. Then Van Damme passed him out. Then a Paul-Heinz Wellman. Only three-tenths of a second separated first from fourth but Coghlan learned the hard way there was a world of difference.
“I ran a race completely the opposite to the way I had visualised all my life. It was the worst tactical race of my life. Because nobody could outkick me on a home straight. Nobody. I beat Walker a week later, in Helsinki, coincidentally. But in Montreal I blew it.”
He got it wrong four years later as well. He was the favourite going into Moscow, just like Sonia was going to Atlanta. Just like Sonia he overdid it in the lead-up.
“Olympic Games year does funny things to your mind,” he smiles, “and often you don’t know really what it does to your mind until it’s done it. In 1980 all the papers and magazines had me down for gold — Sports Illustrated, Track and Field News, everyone. The expectations are enormous and what that does is make you do things differently. You can let the outside world upset you.
“This year Katie Taylor will have to deal with those kinds of expectations. My advice to Katie or anyone else is don’t read the papers. There’s no need to think about the outside world. But I did and I did things differently and two weeks out from Moscow I got sick as a dog. I’d trained too hard.”
It took everything he had just to reach the final and come fourth again. At the time it was depressing but later he could even take a certain pride that he dug in to finish so high.
“It didn’t affect my confidence whatsoever,” he says, “because I still knew I was good enough to win a medal.”
But then Gerry died. So did Jumbo. So did his own dad. On top of that, Coghlan was injured for most of 1982. That was the lowest his confidence ever stooped, not 1976 or 1980. But those two setbacks and those three deaths were what inspired him to glory in Helsinki. His injuries cleared up and then into the run-in to those inaugural world championships in 1983 he trusted himself by resting up. He’d like to think he was always philosophical about winning and especially losing, but he was all the more so after Helsinki.
“I never really dwelt on those disappointments. I just used them to keep spurring me on. I might not have been still running by ’83 if I had won in ’76 or ’80. I definitely wouldn’t have run the sub-four minute mile at 40 years of age.”
There was a nice symmetry there when he became the first man over 40 to break that four-minute mile. Roger Bannister had been the first man under 40 to break that barrier. Bannister never won an Olympic medal either. So, no, the Senator has no regrets. He can — and will — say that he beat the best, beating Walker more often than Walker beat him.
Sometimes people have mistaken his confidence for arrogance, especially on this side of the Atlantic. He understands that but has that very confidence not to let it bother him.
“I don’t think about what people think of me, to be honest with you,” he grins again. “I’ve had a fantastic life out of my sport since I was a kid to this very day and there’s not a day that goes by without somebody being very nice or positive, remembering some race that I ran. But there is a part of the Irish psyche that finds it difficult to distinguish between confidence and cockiness. I mean this with total respect to us Irish because I’m Irish myself but there’s always an attitude here of ‘Do you really think you can?’ while in America it’s ‘Yeah, you will’.
“When I clinched my fist and went by the Russian in Helsinki, some people here thought I was a cocky son of a bitch and was being disrespectful. And I can understand why people thought that but they didn’t know I had buried my father and my coaches in a period of 18 months beforehand. They hadn’t a clue what it was like to finish fourth in the Olympic Games twice. I clenched my fists that time in sheer prayer. Like, ‘Thank God, I got it for you guys!’”
What some mistake as arrogance, others recognise and admire as confidence. When Coghlan first got a text message last spring to “call Enda” when he walked off the golf course at a fundraiser in Mount Juliet, he assumed it was Enda Fitzpatrick, who coaches his son John up in DCU.
“Everything alright there, Enda?” he called back, only to learn that it was Enda Kenny on the other line. In 90 minutes An Taoiseach was going to the media with his nominations to the Seanad. He wanted someone with Coghlan’s positivity and vibrancy in that chamber.
Coghlan accepted it, immediately. His first day in there felt like his first day in school but since then he’s got familiar with the surroundings and subtleties of the gig. In the Seanad, almost everything and anything can come up, “from Palestine to septic tanks” as he says, but what he’s found is that often it’s better to listen to a debate rather than talk for the sake of talking and the Seanad should be merely reformed, not abolished as a certain Enda has suggested.
“The most common advice I got was to identify one or two areas that I had a real passion for and that I could make real inroads in rather than getting caught in all sorts of issues and debates and achieve nothing. Someone said recently to me, ‘Coghlan, you’re playing a blinder in there — you’re not saying much!’ but I’m not going to get caught up in everything. If I have to vote on a matter that I’m previously not that familiar with, I’ll draw my own conclusions from listening to the arguments in the debate.”
On some other issues, he hasn’t been afraid to stand up on — and to ask others to stand up with him too. Back in November in campaigning for greater physical education awareness in primary schools, he had his fellow Senators close their eyes and stand on one foot for a few seconds, to illustrate the benefits of basic physical exercise. That, along with sport and tourism, is his baby. In researching his 40-page report he went all around the country, meeting focus groups in Donegal, Galway, Cork, Dublin and Louth. And 9% of primary schools attended them. That was an impressive return but the findings and challenges are stark. A mindset revolution is required.
“Unfortunately we’re not going to get to the 16- and 17-year-olds now. We need to try to prevent there being another lost generation of kids; that starts in school. The ones that are being lost to society are the kids who are not being cared for at home, because of their backgrounds.
“The kids who get to enjoy extracurricular activities are the ones whose parents are willing to run here, there and everywhere, so if we’re to try and save another generation from being lost, it’s going to begin at school.”
You don’t need state of the art facilities to begin the revolution. He cites one school where in the mornings they’d free their carpark to let the kids exercise. The kids that were perceived to be weaker walked around this red line in one direction for 15 minutes. The stronger kids ran around a blue line. Then the kids from the red line graduated to the blue line. Soon the teachers were finding the kids’ attention spans and academic performance improved significantly.
“We’re talking about maybe even just getting a skipping rope out and helping a kid who can skip 10 times increase that to 20. It’s all going to take time, there’s going to be obstacles, but we’re creating alliances and we’ll keep knocking on those doors because ultimately it’s a win-win situation here. It’s all about the kids.”
He sees all the time how kids and people can grow through exercise and sport. That’s part of why he still coaches, all these years on. A couple of times a week he’ll oversee about 10 middle-distance runners in either the Phoenix Park or maybe up in Santry.
His son John is amongst them. When John was 16 there were kids who used to blitz him but they’re now gone while he’s still here, gradually, steadily improving, a graph his father favours. Last year he ran four minutes for the mile, came second in the national championships and was on the team that won gold in the European cross-country championships, earning him a Sports Council grant of €2,500. For someone who trains twice a day, it’s hardly enough to live on and he still depends on Mum and Daddy’s support to support his dream, but it was a nice acknowledgement of his progress nonetheless. At 23, he has five or six good years ahead of him now.
Their training group varies in talent levels but the one thing Coghlan Senior finds is there is a common love of the sport and to better themselves. Another is that he has an obligation to leave them feeling good about themselves.
“The other day we were up in Santry and it was a windy, cold raw day. We had a real tough workout planned but I said ‘Look, instead of killing them mentally, get them to run with the wind to feel good about themselves’. And afterwards they were saying ‘I feel fantastic’. I was asking for five minutes and they were giving me 4.30s.
“Later we were doing 10 300s. One of the weaker kids couldn’t handle them because there was only 30 seconds between them and after four of them he was knackered. So I said to him, ‘Sit the next two out’. He said ‘No, I need to do all 10.’ I said, ‘Hold on a second, you’re not ready to do that because you’re not conditioned for that yet but this is what you’re ready for now. If I think you can’t do 10 straight but you can do four, rest for two and then another four sticking with the good guys, then you’re going to go home happy, okay?’ And you know what, the kid went home delighted with himself.”
So did the coach. Sometimes easier is better, he says with a smile. He learned it the hard way but he still has that smile.
*Man On A Mission premieres on Setanta Sports next Monday, January 9, at 9.30pm.
