Paul Kimmage: I donāt care for Rob Heffernan ā he still refuses to see the bigger picture about the company he kept
I wonāt listen to the former racewalker on the radio or watch him on TV because his relationship with Francisco āPacoā Fernandez remains an elephant in the room
Rob Heffernan was unapologetic for his relationship with convicted drug cheat āPacoā Fernandez. Photo: Sportsfile
Rob Heffernan was unapologetic for his relationship with convicted drug cheat āPacoā Fernandez. Photo: Sportsfile
Paul Kimmage
Today at 02:30
You see, to be shocked or indignant or angry you have to care. And I donāt care. I donāt care for the Olympic Games. I donāt care for Olympic values. I donāt care for the Olympic anthem. I donāt care for the Olympic flame. I donāt care for the Opening Ceremony, or the Closing Ceremony, or the medals table.
I donāt 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 weāve got great people there, and that if the Olympics matter to them, they should matter to us. Thatās fair. But you canāt tell people what they should and should not feel. They either feel it or they donāt. They either buy it or they donāt.
And I donāt.
Iām not buying Thomas Bach. Iām not buying Craig Reedie. Iām not buying Pat Hickey or Dick Pound or Sebastian Coe. Iād 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. Thatās why Iām in Portugal this week, not Rio.
Iām not buying. I donāt care.
Sunday Independent
August 7, 2016
OK, I get it. I hear you: āNot another bleedinā rant about the Olympics!ā Because Iāve written that column before, and youāve read that column before, and it was a New Yearās resolution not to do it again. Yet here we are, two weeks in, kicking the same can.
It happens Tuesday. Iām in the kitchen listening to Audrey Carville and the team on Morning Ireland when Darren Frehill takes the baton for the sports slot. āGood morning, Audrey,ā he says, beaming with typical good cheer. And thatās fine because letās face it, January can be miserable. But what do you think he wants to talk about?
Yep.
Itās a very significant year for Irish sport, he says. A big focus will be the Olympic Games in Paris, he says. Itās a hundred years since we first competed at an Olympic Games as an independent nation, he says. And just when itās almost bearable, just when you think, āThis might not be too bad,ā you find yourself moving the dial: āOver the course of the next few weeks,ā Frehill says, āIām going to check in on some of our Olympians to hear their stories, hopes and ambitions for the year ahead. And today Iām in Cork and Iām going to meet five-time Olympian Rob Heffernan.ā
Ha! Good luck with that.
Thereās a lot to be said for Rob Heffernan. Heās 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 ā 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 heād had with his friend and training partner, , at their base in Guadix. Fernandez was a star in Spain and one of the worldās great racewalkers. And he knew it.
āSometimes in training Paco and the boys laugh at Ireland,ā Heffernan said. āThey think we are unprofessional. I remember when Alberto Contador won the Tour de France and Paco just shrugs: Rob, itās normal. Pfttttā¦ā
āI said, āPaco, how many people live in Andalucia?ā Four and a half million, he said. The same as Ireland, I said. He was stumped. Thereās no reason we canāt have top-class athletes here. No reason.ā
But there was certainly one reason ā the prevalence of doping in Spain ā and three months later, when Fernandez was implicated with a former cycling doctor in a major drugs bust, Heffernan had a problem.
āHereās how he explains it in his autobiography, Walking Tall: āBecause 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 didnāt know whether he had or not), then yes, he had screwed up. But what he did or didnāt do was nothing to do with me and I couldnāt see the connection at all.ā
The Sports Council and Athletics Ireland didnāt 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:
āWhere are you?ā
āIām in Guadix,ā Heffernan replied.
āYou f*ing better not be!ā
Then Heffernan lost it: āWho the fk do you think you are, even asking me where I am?ā he snapped. āIāll train where I want, when I want. If I go into a nightclub and there are people in the cubicles doing drugs, that doesnāt mean Iām doing drugs. Nobody is going to make me do anything I donāt want to do.ā
But two years later, on the eve of the London Olympics, his belligerence would hurt him. āOlympic medal hope gets doping advice from a drug cheatā was the headline on a piece by Kim Bielenberg in the Irish Independent.
āAn 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 Irelandās best hopes of a medal.
āHis mentor Francisco āPacoā 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.ā
Heffernan was unapologetic. āHis doping ban is none of my business,ā he said. āIf he is around he is willing to offer advice, and I donāt see a problem with itā . . . which is not quite how most people saw it.
āHereās a review of Heffernanās book by Malachy Clerkin in the Irish Times, a month after it was published in December 2016: āThere 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, Heffernanās long-time friend and training partner, canāt but colour the rest of the book, purely by Heffernanās refusal to condemn or distance himself.
āFernandez is so close to Heffernan that heās 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.
āLoyalty to a friend is one thing. But Heffernanās blithe refusal to see how itās 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.
āItās 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. Itās just a pity that his blind spot towards Fernandez makes that impossible.ā
And so it is with me.
I donāt care for Rob Heffernan and all the sacrifices he made. I donāt care what he did in London. I donāt care what he did in Moscow. I donāt care that he competed in five Olympic Games. And I wonāt listen to him on the radio or watch him on TV.
Thereās 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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