He’s an unbelievably good swimmer.
Twin brother was in a few of the finals too
Phelpsy had a jaw like that too
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He doesn’t interview like a doper tbh.
Paul Kimmage: I don’t care for Rob Heffernan – he still refuses to see the bigger picture about the company he kept
I won’t listen to the former racewalker on the radio or watch him on TV because his relationship with Francisco ‘Paco’ Fernandez remains an elephant in the room
Rob Heffernan was unapologetic for his relationship with convicted drug cheat ‘Paco’ Fernandez. Photo: Sportsfile
Rob Heffernan was unapologetic for his relationship with convicted drug cheat ‘Paco’ Fernandez. Photo: Sportsfile
Paul Kimmage
Today at 02:30
You see, to be shocked or indignant or angry you have to care. And I don’t care. I don’t care for the Olympic Games. I don’t care for Olympic values. I don’t care for the Olympic anthem. I don’t care for the Olympic flame. I don’t care for the Opening Ceremony, or the Closing Ceremony, or the medals table.
I don’t care.
I keep hearing I should care. I keep hearing the Olympic Games still matter. I keep being told to accentuate the positive, not the negative, and that we’ve got great people there, and that if the Olympics matter to them, they should matter to us. That’s fair. But you can’t tell people what they should and should not feel. They either feel it or they don’t. They either buy it or they don’t.
And I don’t.
I’m not buying Thomas Bach. I’m not buying Craig Reedie. I’m not buying Pat Hickey or Dick Pound or Sebastian Coe. I’d rather have Citius, Altius, Fortius tattooed to my wrinkled penis with a rusty nail than to have anything to do with the Lords of the Rings or their circus. That’s why I’m in Portugal this week, not Rio.
I’m not buying. I don’t care.
Sunday Independent
August 7, 2016
OK, I get it. I hear you: “Not another bleedin’ rant about the Olympics!” Because I’ve written that column before, and you’ve read that column before, and it was a New Year’s resolution not to do it again. Yet here we are, two weeks in, kicking the same can.
It happens Tuesday. I’m in the kitchen listening to Audrey Carville and the team on Morning Ireland when Darren Frehill takes the baton for the sports slot. “Good morning, Audrey,” he says, beaming with typical good cheer. And that’s fine because let’s face it, January can be miserable. But what do you think he wants to talk about?
Yep.
It’s a very significant year for Irish sport, he says. A big focus will be the Olympic Games in Paris, he says. It’s a hundred years since we first competed at an Olympic Games as an independent nation, he says. And just when it’s almost bearable, just when you think, ‘This might not be too bad,” you find yourself moving the dial: “Over the course of the next few weeks,” Frehill says, “I’m going to check in on some of our Olympians to hear their stories, hopes and ambitions for the year ahead. And today I’m in Cork and I’m going to meet five-time Olympian Rob Heffernan.”
Ha! Good luck with that.
There’s a lot to be said for Rob Heffernan. He’s a former world champion and an Olympic bronze medallist. He won another bronze medal at a European Championships and is unquestionably the best racewalker Ireland has ever known. And he had a lot of admirable qualities — tough, courageous, driven, gritty.
But he also had a problem; for a man who walked the walk, Rob struggled to talk the talk.
Take 2009.
The month was August, and he was telling a story to the Sunday Independent about a recent trip to Spain and a conversation he’d had with his friend and training partner, , at their base in Guadix. Fernandez was a star in Spain and one of the world’s great racewalkers. And he knew it.
“Sometimes in training Paco and the boys laugh at Ireland,” Heffernan said. “They think we are unprofessional. I remember when Alberto Contador won the Tour de France and Paco just shrugs: Rob, it’s normal. Pftttt…’
“I said, ‘Paco, how many people live in Andalucia?’ Four and a half million, he said. The same as Ireland, I said. He was stumped. There’s no reason we can’t have top-class athletes here. No reason.”
But there was certainly one reason — the prevalence of doping in Spain — and three months later, when Fernandez was implicated with a former cycling doctor in a major drugs bust, Heffernan had a problem.
Here’s how he explains it in his autobiography, Walking Tall: “Because Paco was somebody I knew and had trained with, people soon began to jump to conclusions about our connection and I was tarred with the same brush. If Paco had doped (and I genuinely didn’t know whether he had or not), then yes, he had screwed up. But what he did or didn’t do was nothing to do with me and I couldn’t see the connection at all.”
The Sports Council and Athletics Ireland didn’t agree and insisted he change his training base, and cut all ties with Fernandez.
Three months later, in February 2010, he went to a training camp in South Africa, and another in Switzerland, and decided that summer that he was going back to Spain.
Fernandez collected him at the airport. A day later, he got a call from Ray Flynn, the chair of high performance at Athletics Ireland:
“Where are you?”
“I’m in Guadix,” Heffernan replied.
“You f*ing better not be!”
Then Heffernan lost it: “Who the fk do you think you are, even asking me where I am?” he snapped. “I’ll train where I want, when I want. If I go into a nightclub and there are people in the cubicles doing drugs, that doesn’t mean I’m doing drugs. Nobody is going to make me do anything I don’t want to do.”
But two years later, on the eve of the London Olympics, his belligerence would hurt him. “Olympic medal hope gets doping advice from a drug cheat” was the headline on a piece by Kim Bielenberg in the Irish Independent.
“An Olympic medal hopeful last night admitted that he has been receiving coaching advice for the London Games from a Spanish drug cheat. Irish racewalker Robert Heffernan (34) from Togher in Co Cork, is one of Ireland’s best hopes of a medal.
“His mentor Francisco ‘Paco’ Fernandez is currently serving a ban for possession of the banned substance EPO, and will miss the London Olympics. Fernandez, who has been at the centre of a doping scandal in Spain, claims he has supervised the training of Heffernan for the past two years.”
Heffernan was unapologetic. “His doping ban is none of my business,” he said. “If he is around he is willing to offer advice, and I don’t see a problem with it” . . . which is not quite how most people saw it.
Here’s a review of Heffernan’s book by Malachy Clerkin in the Irish Times, a month after it was published in December 2016: “There is an elephant stomping and clomping around the room here so we may as well get it out of the way first. The doping ban served by Paco Fernandez, Heffernan’s long-time friend and training partner, can’t but colour the rest of the book, purely by Heffernan’s refusal to condemn or distance himself.
“Fernandez is so close to Heffernan that he’s worth a paragraph of thanks in the acknowledgements. There is even a point towards the back end of the book where Heffernan wants to send a couple of younger Irish walkers to go train with the Spaniard and loses his temper with Athletics Ireland for not allowing it.
“Loyalty to a friend is one thing. But Heffernan’s blithe refusal to see how it’s any sort of big deal is jarring. Particularly because he spends plenty of the rest of the book writing with undisguised contempt for some of the Russian walkers he is competing against, even confronting them after major championships to ask them why they do it.
“It’s a shame because the book is otherwise a fascinating and eye-opening read . . . The sheer will and Cork belligerence that carried him through his career to eventually win a world gold and belatedly be upgraded to Olympic bronze makes you want to cheer for him for him unreservedly. It’s just a pity that his blind spot towards Fernandez makes that impossible.”
And so it is with me.
I don’t care for Rob Heffernan and all the sacrifices he made. I don’t care what he did in London. I don’t care what he did in Moscow. I don’t care that he competed in five Olympic Games. And I won’t listen to him on the radio or watch him on TV.
There’s a bigger picture here but Rob has never seen it. It started in Cork one day as a kid, when he went into town with a friend from school, and watched as he nicked a jersey from Lifestyle Sports. Five minutes later, his pal was caught and Rob ran home crying to his mother about what had happened. He had done nothing wrong, but she gave him an absolute walloping for hanging around with a guy who robbed stuff.
He should have learned.
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The Carkies won’t like that
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It must be exhausting being Kimmage. He’s right of course as usual. But no one cares
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Kimmage is the best of us
Heffernan is a cunt and most Cork people would agree with that. He was sickening to listen to on Red FM when he had the breakfast show.
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The man can barely watch sport without seething. Maybe we all should as its likely all rigged or financially doped with money from things we’d rather not think about, or riddled with drugs. But then I’d have nothing to watch
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He has a podcast now.
I may have alluded to this before, but I’ve met Rob a few times in recent years, he’s living very (very) close to where I was brought up, one of my family members still lives there and wouldn’t be his biggest fan, he can be a bit of a pain in the hole, just born with way too much energy I think.
But I do know that he’s popular in Mahon, that athletics club that’s he’s after getting off the ground is attracting huge numbers, mostly coming from one of the most disadvantaged areas in the city, it’s a pure labour of love, that’s why RTÉ were around last week which is how he came back under the gaze of Kimmage, which is unfortunate, Kimmage is a really good writer but the crusade is all consuming
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Somebody needs to crusade though, and nobody else is. There’ll be barely a medal won clean at the Olympics in a strength speed or endurance event, certainly not a gold.
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That lance armstrong case was a career case for Kimmage but it came too early for him in his career. I’d say everything he investigates seems rather pointless.
If people ever cared about doping in sport, they definitely don’t care now.
Why? Wars, genocide, ill health, poverty, the grind of daily living.
Doping in sport is very small fry by comparison. People need a small bit of diversion where cynicism doesn’t reign. Even if in the back of their minds they may be sceptical, when it boils down to it they don’t actually care. While Lance Armstrong may have been a fraud, he at least wasn’t killing people. There are many far worse people in the world than Lance Armstrong.
What’s interesting about Paul Kimmage is he doesn’t really care about despotic nation states laundering their reputations through sport, which has much more of a real world impact than some race walker doping. He doesn’t care about Saudi money coming into golf for instance. He says it doesn’t distort competition.
People preferred sport as a spectator activity when it was more ramshackle, before all this doping and sports science and all seater stadiums. People preferred when their heroes were Frank Worthington or Frank McGuigan or Frank Bruno and they could go off on the ferry to Holyhead and then go to Anfield or Old Trafford and pay £2.50 to get into the Kop or the Stretford End. People preferred simpler times because simpler times meant less cynicism and more happiness.
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You don’t know much about his career if you think this, in fact it’s further evidence that you haven’t a bulls notion about much a lot of the time
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Does he write any article that doesn’t involve doping / drugs in sport. It’s a fair cause alright but fuck I’m not buying a Sunday paper to hear about it every single week with a different sport as the only difference. He must be some barrell of laughs to watch a game with.
He’s got a weird fascination with golf and Rory. He’s got it in for rugby because of the way they stonewalled him, he’ll get them yet too. Lance, well, Lance was personal.
Kimmage should start covering darts, snooker and junior club GAA, if only for his own mental health. Everybody needs to believe in something.
An afternoon freezing his bollocks off in Croke Park today would do him the world of good.
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