The Irish heroes who defied the odds on road to Olympic glory

THE Olympic Games have lost much of their glamour over the drug cheats.

As a 12-year-old I remember getting up early to hear the radio commentary of 1,500 meters race from the Melbourne in 1956.

Ronnie Delany was running for Ireland, but few in this country gave him much chance.

A number of the selectors had even opposed sending him to Melbourne, because he had recently lost a couple of races in Dublin to England’s Brian Hewson.

Unlike Eamonn Coughlin, who qualified for the 1976 final by winning his heats in such impressive style that race favourite John Walker of New Zealand singled him out as one to watch. Walker added that he had never heard of Coughlin before the Olympics, even though Eamonn had raced against him before.

Delany just qualified in the pack and nobody was watching him. He was hardly mentioned by the BBC commentator because he hung back for the first two laps. On the final lap he moved up but Hewson, the British boy, was in the lead on the back straight when Delany suddenly burst to the front and the radio reception seemed to go wonky.

It wasn’t until the race was over that I knew for sure that Delany had become the first Irishman to win a gold medal since Bob Tisdall and Pat O’Callaghan won gold medals on the same day in 1932.

Ireland just missed out on another gold in Melbourne that night when Fred Teidt lost the gold medal to split decision that was internationally denounced as a political perversion.

The Eastern bloc judges all voted for Romanian Nicolae Linca, who actually fought with a broken right wrist. The 24 years since the previous gold in 1932 seemed like more than a lifetime to a 12-year-old, but no one would have guessed that it would be a further 36 years before Michael Carruth would win the next gold medal for Ireland at the Barcelona Olympics in 1992.

One of the more poignant scenes that day was watching the late Fred Teidt on RTÉ in the Carruth home. He must have thought what might have been.

The first chance I got to see the Olympics on TV was the Tokyo Games of 1964. I was in Texas at the time and I watched eagerly for any Irish competitor. I saw none until the final event, just before the closing ceremony. It was the marathon and Jim Hogan was up front from the start. As they turned for home there was only two men left in the race for gold — Hogan, and Abebe Bikila of Ethiopia who was en route to become the first man in history to retain the marathon title.

Hogan stayed with Bikila for 22 miles, but then collapsed on the road.

The American commentators were generous in their admiration. Jim had run himself into the ground. But it seemed he was a total failure as far as Irish officials were concerned. He had dropped out of the 10,000 after he was lapped. His feet were sore from blisters but he got no treatment. It was his first marathon and he was woefully unprepared, as he did not realise it was necessary to drink water during the race.

“Eventually I recovered and got back to the village and went to bed for a few hours,” Hogan recalled recently in his memoirs, The Irishman Who Ran for England. “I recovered from the exhaustion fairly quickly but my legs were badly blistered.” “I felt I ran a real good race, the way I wanted to run it,” he continued. “If the Irish doctor had paid more attention to me between the 10,000 metres and the marathon I believe I’d have finished second. I knew nothing about taking drinks before the race or the importance of hydration. No Irish official bothered to ask about my welfare. The fact of the matter is that I never met an official or indeed any Irishman till I got back on the plane to go home.”

For the next year Irish officials ignored him. He was living and working in England, and he had plenty of reason to resent those running Irish athletics. Born Jim Cregan in Co Limerick, he ran in England under the name of Jim Hogan, because, otherwise, he was afraid he would not be allowed to run again when he got home to Co Limerick.

This was the time of split in Irish athletics. He became so disillusioned after his experiences in Tokyo that he declared for Britain in 1966. He competed at the European Athletic Championships in Budapest, where he won the marathon. In winning the gold medal, he did something no Irish person had ever done competing for Ireland.

The first athlete to win a gold medal representing Ireland at the European Championships was not even born yet. Sonia O’Sullivan, who born in 1969, won Ireland’s first gold medal at the European Championships in Helsinki in 1994.

She also won a gold medal at the World Championship in Gothenburg the following year. She was at the height of her running and went to the Atlanta Olympics in 1996 as a raging favourite.

Irish officials were so sure that she was going to win that the Irish Olympic Committee (OCI) and BLE, the athletics organisation, got involved in an obscene squabble over what Sonia would wear. They settled the petty differences by deciding that she would wear the BLE kit while running and the OCI tracksuit on the victory rostrum collecting her medal. What contemptible arrogance!

NO IRISH athlete had won a gold medal since Delany 40 years earlier, and they played their part in ensuring that we are still waiting for an athletic gold 52 years on. When Sonia appeared in wrong outfit she was made to change publicly in the tunnel. That was the last thing anyone needed before a race.

For whatever reason, she fared dismally at Atlanta. The know-alls who had been suggesting she only had to turn up to pick up the gold savaged her. The person who made most sense in the midst of all the disappointment was her father.

“Lads,” John O’Sullivan reminded the media, “nobody died.”

Sonia was competing against not only the best in the world but also the drug cheats and the Irish officials. Had she gone and declared for Australia, where she was living in 2000, nobody could have blamed her. But she competed for Ireland and won the silver medal at the Sydney Olympics.

In his memoirs, Jim Hogan noted that he competed for Britain at the Mexico Olympics in 1968. But like most of the long-distance runners from low altitude, he had little chance in the high altitude of Mexico City. While there he went to a bullfight and was appalled by the bloody way in which they taunted the bull. As the matador prepared for the kill, the bull made a lunge and drove him high into the air.

“When he hit the ground, he was dead as a doornail,” Hogan noted. “So I jumped up and shouted: ‘Three cheers for The Bull’ and the whole place went silent. There wasn’t a murmur in the crowd.”

Once sensed Jim’s contempt for Irish athletic officials was turned on the poor matador.

Jim Hogan’s The Irishman Who Ran for England is published by Curragh Press (€14.99).