Jerry Kiernan

IT was September 2010 when we last sat at a table opposite Jerry Kiernan.
But the text message that drops carries an echo. “Meet in Er Buchetto.”
That was the arranged meeting place five and a half years ago too.
So you arrive early, pick out a table and give a wave when he comes through the door.
Kiernan nods in acknowledgement, then sits at a different table.
“This is where I always sit.” When you meet with Jerry Kiernan, you do so on his terms.
Making small talk, you point out that the 2010 interview was carried out at the same table.
Again, he nods. “Yes, this is where I always sit.”
Who is Jerry Kiernan? To some, he is the madman with a mullet who crops up on RTE during major athletics events.
To others, he is that curious beast, a Kerryman who hates Gaelic football.
James Nolan had his own view. After his 1500m semi-final at the 2004 Olympics, he dismissed Kiernan as ‘’a cross-country slogger’’.
But Kiernan is one of the most fascinating figures in Irish sport.
A four minute miler who finished ninth in the strongest marathon field in Olympic history.
A Barcelona fanatic who pays e200 a year for his ‘socio’ voting rights at the club.
An Italophile who speaks in their native tongue to the Italians working the espresso machines.
Most importantly, Kiernan is a coach with a major role to play in 2016.
Two of his athletes, Ciara Mageean and Sergiu Ciobanu, already have qualifying times for Rio. Two others, John Travers and Joe Sweeney, are also chasing spots on the plane.
So how will Kiernan coach them from a television studio in Dublin?
“I don’t know how to Skype at the moment but they all tell me it’s easy,’’ he said.
“My son was in Russia last year and I was a bit concerned about him but he said I could Viber him.
“I had no idea what he meant, but John Travers is in Boston and I did a Whatsapp with him so I am making progress there.
“Ciara is going to a holding camp with Ireland on July 28. She’ll have finished the European Championships on July 10.
“All she’ll be doing is ticking over. In actual fact, Ciara doesn’t need me there. Ciara is a very strong-minded person.
“Now, we will talk every day but she doesn’t need me transmitting my nervousness to her on a daily basis.”
Mageean, a World Junior silver medalist over 1500m, was dogged by injury for three years.
She will be 24 by the time Rio comes around, and it will be fascinating to see if she can live up to her massive underage potential.
“It seems strange to say it but being hurt at that time was actually not a bad thing, in the long run,’’ said Kiernan.
“She was doing camogie training, doing athletics training, working very hard. She wouldn’t have been able to keep that going.
“Laura Weightman was sixth in that World Junior final and went to the 2012 Olympic final but most of the girls in that race have done very little.
“That is the thing about underage athletics. It’s no guarantee of senior success.”
On retiring from cycling a couple of weeks back, Martyn Irvine spoke of how he hadn’t enjoyed life in the Olympic village in 2012 as some Irish team members were there, in his words, just to party.
Sonia O’Sullivan was Chef de Mission to the Ireland team at those Games, and was far from impressed with some of them.
“I never before heard so many (Irish) athletes refer to themselves as ‘Olympians’ — as if that was the greatest thing ever,’’ she told the Irish Independent.
“It didn’t seem to matter how you performed there, just getting there was good enough.
“The most disappointing thing was that there was a lot of effort put in by athletes to get the ‘A’ standards, but there wasn’t the same effort put in by the athletes to go back and replicate that. Once they got the standard there was a bit of relief and people start to relax.
“Athletics definitely left Team Ireland down.
“They are the biggest squad in the Olympics team. They expect, demand and get so much, but for what they delivered? There are other athletes from other countries who don’t get near as much and they do better.”
Kiernan nods in agreement when this is put to him.
“Looking at the team from 2012, I can immediately think of three or four that were there just to be there,’’ he said.
“They should never have been on the Olympic team. They were there just to add it on to their CVs, or to take selfies at the opening ceremony.
“There were some Irish athletes at the Olympic Games in 2012 that haven’t run since.
“So they didn’t love the sport, they just happened to be good at it.”
The 1984 Olympic marathon was the greatest race at the Games ever, from an Irish point of view.
John Treacy claimed silver. Kiernan finished ninth with cramping in the last few miles forcing him out of the medal reckoning.
Yet the Kerryman has never watched the race since.
“I had a DVD of it but never put it on. I don’t have the DVD anymore. I gave it to a Belfast lad and haven’t seen him since,’’ he said.
“But, even if I still had it, I wouldn’t watch it.
“I never watch myself on RTE. I won’t read this interview. I don’t have any clippings from newspapers from my career.
“After one of those GAA controversies, I met a fella in here for an interview.
“It was supposed to be going into a daily edition, but he then rang me up to say it was going in the Sunday paper.
“I went ‘oh, thanks’ knowing full well that I wouldn’t be reading it, didn’t matter to me what day it was in.”
Track and field will take its place on the Rio schedule in a battered state, with the fall-out from the Russia and IAAF scandals still lingering.
So why does Kiernan still believe in the sport?
“I’ve often asked myself that question. I think it must be part of the human condition…you know certain athletes, certain systems are rotten, park them over there and just get on with things,’’ he said.
“I look at the athletes that Ciara will be up against in Rio and don’t believe that any of them are actually cheating.
“I believe if Ciara is beaten, she’ll be beaten by girls that are actually better than her.
“I just look at their profiles. There’s nothing startling, no big leaps and they’ve been around for a while.
“Everything they’ve done is believable. There are athletes and records I don’t believe in, that’s certainly the case too.
“If you asked me whether most medals are clean, I wouldn’t know how to answer that.”
Kiernan’s 2:12.19 would have earned him a top 10 finish in every Olympic marathon since.
But, to him, it wasn’t the highlight of his career. That came 40 years ago this June at Crystal Palace.
“There was always something magical about the four minute mile. I’d listen to the radio and hear the stories of the great milers,’’ he said.
“It was always the glamour event. I wanted to be a four minute miler because so few people had done it.
“The exact time didn’t matter. Once I saw the number three first on the scoreboard, I’d done it, it was special. That was it.”

SIDEBAR
JERRY Kiernan grew up worshipping Mick O’Connell, the great Kerry midfielder, but he has long since fallen out of love with the GAA.
And he was glad to hear Armagh boss Kieran McGeeney claim that GAA players aren’t elite athletes.
“The north Kerry final was on two or three weeks ago,’’ he said,
“My brother-in-law is kind of into it, and he said to me that he’d never seen such a collection of fat arses in his life.
“I came across a training diary of mine from 1996, when I was 43. I was still running 110 miles a week.
“Many, many people train every day. They’re fitter than 99 per cent of GAA players.
“When you look at the publicity they get and compare what they do to what runners do, what cyclists do, what swimmers do, what boxers do, what rowers do…you realise they do very little in comparison.
“Kieran McGeeney is the first GAA person to come out and say exactly how it is.
“Now, will he be shouted at when he’s walking down the street?
“That happens to me. If there was a gold medal for biliousness, I’d give it to a certain type of GAA supporter.”
Kiernan comes from a county that deifies a host of ‘legends’, but he has no time for such talk in any sport.
“It’s bullshit, it really is, total bullshit,’’ he said.
“First of all, if you start with the premise that every sportsperson is only doing what they’re equipped to do, why should we make a big deal about it?
“The idea of putting sportspeople up on pedestals, of being so in awe of them that you only speak of them in gushing terms, I don’t know…it’s utter nonsense.”