So near yet so far.
he has an incredible diet
Oh I’m sure he gobbles all sorts
Look at the eyes on Kiptum, Ben Johnson like
Can’t be true.
His race is run.
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Ah no. Thats very sad to read.
The rugby concussion at 13 is a very interesting/sad twist I wasn’t expecting. You’d wonder.
Sonia had a piece of him a few years ago
We’ve all been there
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The winner will never be remembered, Spencer will never be forgotten.
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I could watch that on repeat.
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Icarus
All Spencer is guilty of is wanting it too much.
He absolutely emptied himself fair play to him.
You can ask no more.
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Rest well Jerry
Ireland’s finest running partnership one forged by pain and passion
After meeting in 1974, Jerry Kiernan and Murt Coleman formed a bond that would transcend everything
Jerry Kiernan took a shock win at the 1982 Dublin Marathon, despite having taken to the startline on a whim
BILLY SITCKLAND / INPHO
Sunday October 29 2023, 12.01am BST, The Sunday Times
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Heading into the Dublin marathon every year, Murt Coleman’s routine with Jerry Kiernan never varied. Get to the start line and watch the spectacle as the enormous wave of runners slowly engulfed the city streets. Then get across to mile 23 to support the athletes clambering over the mental wall towering between them and the finish, living the pain with them.
“That’s where the guys coming in would need a boost,” says Coleman.
They had both run and suffered with them. In 1982 Kiernan ran the Dublin marathon for the first time almost in a temper. He was 29, suffering injuries and trying to make sense of a track career that wasn’t getting support from home or enhanced by a sustainable track season. Watching rivals like Neil Cusack and Dick Hooper win the first two Dublin marathons, it didn’t seem a huge leap to back himself to win one.
Without any prior experience he took off like a whippet, clocking in at world-record pace by the halfway mark. Eventually, he started to tie up. Coleman was in Fairview when Kiernan came into view, four minutes ahead of the pack.
“He stopped in front of me with cramps for about two minutes,” says Coleman. “I remember him limping along.”
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He stopped again outside Holles Street maternity hospital, “a felicitous spot to stretch,” Kiernan said years later. As he suffered to the finish, Eamon Coghlan jumped down from the timing truck to join him, shouting encouragement in his ear. He willed himself to victory in 2:13:44, setting a record that lasted 22 years.
When the pain subsided that evening, Kiernan wondered with his coach Brendan O’Shea whether maybe the marathon was his event. Two years later he springboarded into the 1984 Olympic marathon, cherished since for John Treacy’s silver medal, finishing ninth in the greatest marathon race of them all.
For the generation who grew up in a time when the Dublin marathon was a new, sprawling event, filled with familiar names, the memory equation is simple: Dublin Marathon + Child of the 80s = Jerry Kiernan, all spidery frame and mullet, driving forward with fierce aggression and apparent abandon.
“For me the Dublin marathon was everything,” Kiernan said in 2014. “I’m not going to compare it to the Olympics but I ran in the Olympic marathon because of Dublin. If the Dublin City Marathon never existed I probably never would have realised I was good over the distance.”
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Everything about the marathon suited him: the challenge, the scale of the physical challenge; the atmosphere for the one single day when his sport received the public recognition he always wished for it.
“Raheny was like the Tour de France,” he said. “You know when they’re climbing the Alpe d’Huez and you think the cyclist is going to run into the crowd and then they part? That was the way Raheny was. It was incredibly exciting.”
Gavin Noble, Derval O’Rourke, Jerry Kiernan, David Gillick, Ailis McSweeney and Eanna Bailey, pictured before the launch of RTE’s Rio Olympics coverage in 2016
RYAN BYRNE / INPHO
Ten years later Kiernan won the Dublin marathon again in 1992, aged 39. Years afterwards he found some old training diaries that revealed he was still running 120 miles a week by then. Coleman was at his shoulder, running mornings and evenings with work as a vet and Kiernan’s teaching shoehorned in between.
It was the training they loved, and the chats. There was the day Kiernan took off through Pine Forest in the Dublin mountains and gave Coleman a treatise on the history of India for 20-odd miles. In 1990 they took off to Yugoslavia for a fortnight’s training and clocked 140 miles ahead of the Belfast marathon. “He ran 24 times in 12 days,” says Coleman. “I ran 23”. Kiernan ended up winning the race having led from start to finish, Coleman came eighth.
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Their friendship went deep. January 27, 1974 was the day they first met, made unforgettable by the gale force winds and driving rain that whipped around Mallow racecourse at the national cross-country championships. “It was arctic. People still remember it. I’ll never forget it. It was so cold when Jerry was putting on his clothes, his father had to help him.”
As they defrosted on the train to Dublin, Coleman from Galway realised Kiernan from Listowel was living around the corner from him in Cabinteely, so they started training together. Coleman remembers the day in May 1977 when Kiernan took off from St Brigids in Foxrock where he taught for London to run at Crystal Palace. Two buses to the airport and a flight later, he got to the track for the 3000m, broke the Irish record by six seconds and got the last flight back to Dublin before turning up at school the following morning like nothing happened.
“And when he got home we did 10 miles in Belfield that evening,” says Coleman.
Kiernan ran those marathons as he lived every moment: fully engaged and fascinated by his chosen task. The night before Kiernan died in January 2021, Coleman was on the phone with him. Kiernan sounded poorly. “Hold on,” he told him, “I’ll come over in the morning.”
Then, he was gone. Beyond the miles they spent running in Dublin and around Kiernan’s second home in Italy, the hours of conversation in Er Buchetto café in Ranelagh where Kiernan held court, the ideas and principles that drove Kiernan’s life seemed too important to dwindle away.
For years Coleman and Kiernan had trained runners in Belfield on Tuesdays and Saturdays and never charged a cent. In St Brigid’s Kiernan used to gather students together at midday for a run around the yard. Coleman’s daughter-in-law has continued the tradition since. When Kiernan went to the 1984 Olympics, Coleman did a little fundraising to help join a few dots in his training regime.
“When he died, we said he had put so much into athletics,” says Coleman. “Everything was done for nothing. Putting back into his sport was his legacy and that should continue.”
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Introducing people to running, supporting promising athletes seeking to make the jump like Kiernan did in 1982, that was what he did. In 2021 Coleman created the Jerry Kiernan Foundation with his sons with the same hopes. This year the foundation raised nearly €70,000 that helped fund a dozen athletes across track and field. As the Olympics come into view they hope to increase that support next year.
Today, a scattering of athletes connected to the foundation will be in the marathon field. Coleman will be at mile 23 again. Another link unbroken.
“I talk to Jerry every day,” says Coleman. On these days, when runners gather in shared struggle, he lives again.
•Information on events and athletes supported by the Jerry Kiernan Foundation at jerrykiernanfoundation.org
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