John Treacy on Jerry Kiernan: 'He had this great sense of purpose about him'

Former Olympian Jerry Kiernan taking part in a charity 5k race in Ballinlough.

When I got the call yesterday, I was floored – totally and utterly shocked. For those of us who knew Jerry Kiernan, that feeling will take a long time to leave us. The guy was a great friend to us all.

I got to know him properly in 1981. After years in America, I had come back to Ireland and I was living in Dundrum, doing a lot of training in Marlay Park. For two or three years Jerry and I used to meet on a Sunday morning with about 10 other guys and we’d go for a 22-mile run up the Dublin Mountains.

I got to know him very well during those years. We were on different spectrums – I was concentrating on the track, he was concentrating on the roads – but we loved training together and we did an awful lot of it. We mixed socially as well: he’d come over and meet my wife and we’d all go out together.

Jerry wouldn’t be overawed by anyone. He had confidence in his own ability and when we trained together we knocked lumps off each other.

He’d have an opinion on everything and wasn’t afraid to share it, and that’s what endeared him to us all. In many ways he was a serious guy, but also a fella you’d enjoy going for a pint with – which we often did. He had the right approach to the sport: he trained hard, he knew how to relax but he certainly was always a very dedicated athlete.

Running-wise, our paths didn’t cross a huge amount but we did have some good battles on the track, road and at cross-country.

In 1984, we were both selected for the marathon at the Los Angeles Olympics alongside Dick Hooper. Ahead of the Games, Jerry was training in California and I remember arriving in the village the morning of the race and spending that day with Jerry and Dick. The memories are vivid in my mind: Jerry was calm, we all were, and he had this great sense of purpose about him.

The heat was oppressive, 87 degrees Fahrenheit, and I remember at halfway in the race there was a turning point. I was right with the leaders, and when we turned I saw Jerry was a good 200 yards behind us. Then, once we reached 18, 19 miles I turned around and suddenly Jerry is on my shoulder. I said: where in the name of Christ did he come from?

But that was Jerry: tough, resilient.

He finished ninth that day and while my performance overshadowed his result, if you were a real athletics fan you’d appreciate how fantastic his performance was. He was up the front, mixing it with the best in the world in a fabulous field. It was a stellar run, his greatest ever race.

How many sportspeople can you say that about? That they nailed the biggest performance of their career on the biggest day of all? Those of us who knew of his calibre always deemed him a truly world-class runner, and that day he proved it.

But Jerry was much more than an athlete. If he was living in the States and committed full-time to running he’d have done extremely well, but he was always dedicated to his teaching.

I’ve met loads of his students down through the years and their parents – in different places and in different countries – and they’d always say the same thing: he was the greatest teacher of all time.

The parents told me the kids absolutely worshipped him. He took an interest in every kid and, professionally, he was in a league of his own. That speaks to the person he was, far from the competitive arena.

More recently, most of the public might know him for his work on TV and I think his punditry was always on the mark. He always did his homework, he wasn’t spoofing. He had an opinion, and if he said something about a person it was usually well-founded.

He was very well-read and he always carried that knowledge to the screen. He spoke with authority.

As a coach, the contribution he made is second to none. I was delighted when he started working with Ciara Mageean. At the time she was in a bad place with injury and it was a courageous thing for him to do. He did a great job, guiding her back to a European medal in 2016, getting back on her feet and that was really, really important for the trajectory of her career. More than anything, he gave his time to people – to young guys and girls who were coming up through the sport, for whom he will be an irreplaceable presence.

He’ll be sorely missed by all of us who were lucky enough to know him.

- Sport Ireland CEO John Treacy won a silver medal at the 1984 Olympic Games.