Irish athletes Rob Heffernan and Olive Loughnane awarded medals

It may have come four years late but Cork’s world champion race walker Rob Heffernan is now finally an Olympic medallist.

In a largely expected announcement, the confirmed yesterday he had been retrospectively awarded the bronze medal from the 50km walk at the London 2012 Games.

The court ruling also means 20km Cork race walker Olive Loughnane will be upgraded from silver to gold for the 2009 World Championships in Berlin.

“I’ve actually retired for about three years and I’m still winning medals so it’s a really good day for me,” the now mother-of-two said yesterday on The Ray D’Arcy Show on RTÉ Radio 1.

She had produced a season’s best time of 1:28:58 to chase home Olga Kaniskina at the Berlin championships in 2009. “I raced really hard on the day and couldn’t get another ounce out of myself, so I was so excited,” Ms Loughnane said. “It’s the icing on the cake now to be elevated from silver to gold.”

The decision meant that six Russian athletes lost an Olympic gold medal, while two lost world championship golds. One of the Russian athletes was Sergei Kirdyapkin who took gold in London 2012 — pushing Heffernan into an agonising fourth place.

Heffernan was “buzzing” ysterday after the realisation he was now an Olympic medallist.

“I’m buzzing. I got a generic email off the Court of Arbitration. I had to read it a few times. I read the section relevant to me a few times just in case I made a mistake. It just said that Kirdyapkin’s result are now null and void from 2009 to October 2012 so that makes me an Olympic bronze medallist now. It’s unreal,” he said.

Heffernan said he knew deep down that Kirdyapkin was not a clean athlete, even in London, but there was nothing he could do about it.

“From day one I knew it myself inside but that doesn’t matter. You are forgotten about. You’re remembered, as the fella who finished fourth, for a month. After that people’s lives move on and when you don’t have a medal you are forgotten,” he said.

The 2013 world champion walker said he wasn’t sure how he would react to getting upgraded but that he was “over the moon”.

“People in Cork have been coming up and congratulating me on being the new Olympic medallist,” he told TodayFM. “A lot of people in Cork, and I don’t know if it is a Cork thing, but they had been congratulating me on the gold and I had never bothered correcting them.”