An Post proves song right: ‘There’s only one Rob Heffernan’

If anyone is looking to send a letter of congratulations to Rob Heffernan, it seems you don’t even need his address — just pop “Gold Medal Winner” on the envelope and An Post will get it to him.

The Cork athlete has been on a whirlwind homecoming tour since becoming only the third Irish person in history to win a gold medal at the World Athletic’s Championships last week.

After two homecomings in Cork, one on an open-top bus through the city and a second in his home parish of Togher, letters of congratulations are also coming in from around the country.

One of the letters of congratulations was tweeted by the man himself late on Monday night. The picture accompanying the tweet simply showed an envelope with the address: “To Rob Heffernan & Family, Gold Medal Winner, Cork.”

The reaction via Twitter was simply: ‘This is crazy... #welldoneanpost’

Last night, the tweet had more than 170 retweets.

One of those to respond was one of Rob’s fellow 50km walk athletes Brendan Boyce, who tweeted: “I guess the songs are right... ‘there’s only one Robert Heffernan’.”

That was clearly the view of An Post, which knew where to post the letter.

An Post spokesman Angus Laverty said the postal service was simply doing its job and, as there was “only one Rob Heffernan”, he wasn’t hard to find. “We do our best to get the mail to the people it is being sent to and in this case, we were very happy to get it to Rob,” said Mr Laverty.

“Rob is a world champion and as the song goes: ‘There is only one Rob Heffernan’ so we were pretty sure where to find him. It just goes to show you how magic the old fashioned post can be.”

Rob also took to Twitter to thank the people of Togher “where it all began”: “Huge thank you to the Togher community this evening. Really nice night and good to see everybody so happy and positive.”