Heffernan gearing up for 50km

Robert Heffernan will look for inspiration from his one-time coach when he lines up Saturday’s men’s 50km walk.

Heffernan was in recovery mode yesterday after Saturday’s spectacular show which saw him post the second fastest time of his career at 1:20:18 for ninth place in the men’s 20km walk.

Next Saturday (9am) he will line up for the event he has been preparing for since he finished fourth in a last-minute double-up at the European championships in Barcelona two years ago. His mentor and legendary Olympic racewalker Robert Korzeniowski finished eighth in the 20km at the 1996 Olympics and rebounded a few days later to win the first of four gold medals at 50km.

A medal of any colour would be just reward for Heffernan and he would have been closer to a podium position on Saturday were it not for the manner in which the Chinese walkers tore the field to shreds in the last 5km.

Heffernan was comfortable until laps of 7:45 and then 7:31 left the field gasping — defending champion Valeriy Borchin collapsed on the road — and Heffernan found himself adrift.

“But it was a great performance,” Heffernan’s coach Liam O’Reilly, said. “He was delighted with all the support from the Irish fans — the roar around The Mall was deafening.”

To be ready for this Saturday’s race Heffernan was whisked back to the Irish holding camp in Lansbury where team physio Paul O’Neill went to work on him. “His recovery is going very well but obviously his muscles are sore and we expect a crash tomorrow but it won’t be a problem. He has a steely, single-minded determination”, Bandon man O’Reilly said.

“It was a very hard race,” Heffernan said. “We knew there would be a burn-up over the last 5k so the plan was to go hard from gun to tape, stay positive and hopefully other people would drop off and we weren’t far off. It was a good positive result, my second-fastest time ever and I wasn’t far off the top five so I can’t complain.

“I was aggressive — I think it’s the best way I can race. It’s very simple. I was going to take control and I wasn’t going to let other people dictate what I was going to do. I wasn’t going to let anyone determine, whether it was 77 minutes or 82 — I was going to go very hard and try to stay in contention with the group and stay as positive for as long as I could and use it for next week.”

Despite their strength in the discipline, China had not won an Olympic race walking medal until Saturday when Ding Chen won gold on his 20th birthday in 1:18:46, and Zhen Wang took bronze, 1:19:25, with young Guatemalan, Erick Barrondo, second in 1:18:57.