Born to Perform Read online

  On occasion, I would do a few extra lengths of the pool to find I was running behind time, and, when I pulled up outside 2 Patrick Street, staff and customers would often be waiting for me to jump off my racing bike to open up the shop for afternoon business.

  At 6.00 p.m. it was gear on and straight out the door for a two-hour cycle, followed by a six-mile run out by the river bank, arriving home by 9.00 p.m. for a meal covered in tinfoil, which my mother had made up and laid out for her now triathlon-focused son.

  Travelling to Sligo for the All-Ireland Triathlon entailed a five-hour bus journey, with stops in every town en route. Yet my journey was nearly over before it began when the bus driver at Colbert Station refused to take my bike on board. A brainwave took hold of me. I dashed over to the train station to where I knew a fellow Limerick Athletic Club athlete, Freddie McInerney, was working. Freddie saw my distress, and whatever he said to the bus driver did the trick. My machine and I were Sligo bound.

  The following morning, I woke up in Sligo with no doubt that I was ready to win the big race. My training had been meticulous, but now I had to check the course. In one of the wettest days I can recall, I cycled the 56-mile route and the following day, the day before the triathlon, I cycled the 6 miles out to Rosses Point from the Sligo Park Hotel to do a one-mile swim, leaving my racing bike hidden in the long grass on the rough of Sligo Golf Club grounds. That evening, I ran the 13.1-mile course to ensure I knew what was facing me the following day.

  At 7.30 a.m. on the morning of the race, I was first into the dining hall for a gigantic meal to fuel up. After a few minutes, an elegant well-dressed man with a vaguely familiar face looked at me lashing and scoffing my face with food. It was Ronnie Delany. At the time, Ronnie Delany was the chairman of Cospóir, the Irish Sporting Organisation, and he had travelled to Sligo as a guest of honour to start the race and to present the awards. He asked me if I was in Sligo as a participant or spectator of the triathlon. I told him that not alone was I competing, but I was confident I would win the event. He smiled and wished me good luck.

  When I did win the event and later met Ronnie again, he exclaimed that he had not expected me to finish the event, never mind win it. When he had seen all I had eaten for breakfast, he was sure it was the perfect recipe for an all-day stitch, or worse.

  The 1983 winner Michael Walsh was gunning for his second national title, and he exited the swim ahead of me and powered his way around the cycle route. He had the experience and miles in his legs from long, tough days competing in the Rás Tailteann. I had to run like hell to catch him. Walsh had six minutes up on me as I started to run out of the Sligo racecourse.

  I remember Brendan O’Reilly of RTÉ shouting out, “You are six minutes down. Do you think you can make it up?” On camera my response was captured: “You bet I can. I’m going to win this thing.”

  Running at five minutes and ten seconds per mile, against Walsh’s seven minutes per mile, I soon passed him just after the four-mile mark. I had gobbled him up – and I already felt like the admiral of the fleet, heading for the first of many wins. Running the half marathon in 74 minutes saw me cross the finish line down by Sligo’s Garavogue River in 3 hours 57 minutes, with second place finisher Adrian Byrne, another cycling specialist from Dublin, coming in 10 minutes behind.

  The faces of RTÉ commentators Brendan O’Reilly and Thelma Mansfield went into shock when they attempted to interview me. I ran through the finish line, straight over to the pier, took off my running shoes and sports top, and jumped into the river. You see, instead of wishing during the last miles of the run for an ice cold drink, I had visualised crossing the finish line and basking in the cold flowing river. I floated in the river for ten minutes. RTÉ’s camera crew in the helicopter above captured the moment.

  Ground camera crew, Justin Nelson, Brendan O’Reilly, Thelma Mansfield and a large crowd had deserted the finish line 100 metres away to watch and wait on the shoreline to see the new All-Ireland Triathlon champion. The interview was conducted and I was driven away to the Sligo Park Hotel, where a banquet dinner and awards were handed out that night. I never got to greet any of the athletes who finished behind me at the finish line.

  On that day in Sligo in June 1984, RTÉ was not the only media organisation covering the event. The international magazine Triathlete had sent its feature writer from the US and the Irish Triathlon was given a five-page feature, with the photo of me crossing the finish line making centre spread. The new sport was catching on very quickly. Ireland also had its own triathlon magazine, Triathlon Ireland, edited by Edward Smith from Belfast, who went on to become a sports producer with BBC Northern Ireland. The Irish Runner magazine, edited by Frank Greally, also gave triathlon generous coverage in the early years, and Frank and Lindie Naughton of the Evening Herald also travelled to Sligo to pen articles on the race.

  Then came something of a bombshell: after my first All-Ireland Triathlon win, RTÉ announced that the all-expenses-paid trip for the winners was not to Hawaii for the Ironman, but to Nice, in the Cote d’Azur, France, for the Triathlon World Championships.

  Hawaii would be a far more attractive proposition for any true triathletes. The Ironman was the ultimate. It was the Mount Everest of the sport. I had watched the TV episodes of Hawaii Five-O, and felt I already knew Hawaii. But this time Hawaii would have to wait. The head honchos up in Donnybrook were taking the cheap option, I reasoned. Although, actually, this was not the case: by the mid-1980s the Ironman was truly established as the ultimate in endurance events, but triathlon, as a sport outside of Hawaii, was also establishing itself as a very capable and attractive sport. Indeed, the Nice Triathlon, organised by the Mark McCormack International Management Group and funded by the Ville de Nice, had a far better prize fund for the top-twenty professional athletes. Nice was vying for having the world’s best triathletes competing in its event, which consisted of a 2-mile swim, a 77-mile cycle and a 20-mile run.

  Triathlon had earned its stripes. People were now very clear that an Ironman competition meant a 2.4-mile swim, a 112-mile bike and a 26.2-mile run, and triathlon itself was any swim–bike–run competition under those distances. From a commercial perspective, triathlon was suddenly very hot. Bicycle companies wanted to be associated with top triathletes using their product. Running shoe companies and swim attire companies likewise.

  The big steel Peugeot bike that I rode to win the All-Ireland Triathlon was like a rusty gate by international standards. Kieran McQuaid, brother of Pat McQuaid, now the president of Union Cycliste Internationale, and his business partner Shay O’Hanlon, a four-time winner of the Rás Tailteann, came to my aid. They operated President Cycles, a bicycle distribution company, and they kindly supplied me with state-of-the-art Vitus aluminium bikes and decorated the frames with President Cycles stickers. The Vitus frame was the exact same machine that Seán Kelly rode with the KAS Team, the professional Spanish-based team of which he was lead cyclist. It was super lightweight compared to my steel bike, which I still kept as a workhorse for winter riding. I had made my first rookie mistake. The new bike was top notch, but, in taking delivery of it days before travelling to Nice, it had not registered with me that it would take time to get accustomed to the new machine. Nice was not going to be so nice after all.

  The 1984 Triathlon World Championship was a watershed for RTÉ, for me and also for the women’s winner of the Irish championship, Diane Sloan from Belfast. The cycle course in Nice was a 77-mile route that ventured into the Maritime Alps, and up steep climbs and narrow roads with treacherous descents. Diane Sloan, Michael Walsh, Adrian Byrne, Dave O’Connor and I trained on the course a few days before the big event. On a tricky descent, Diane crashed into an oncoming car and hit the windscreen full-on. She had a choice: to pull hard left and hit the car or avoid the car and go over the cliff parapet, with the potential of falling down almost 500 feet to likely death. She broke her leg in several places, and that ended her involvement in the sport of triathlon. But she still raised a s
mile the following day.

  This meant that, on race day, RTÉ only had its male Irish Triathlon champion to focus on. Fortunately, a group of Irish triathletes who finished in the minor placings in Sligo were given £500 each by RTÉ towards the trip to Nice; so, Adrian Byrne, Michael Walsh, Dave O’Connor, Ann Kearney and Donia Nugent also travelled and, in some ways, saved the day.

  Some 35 miles into the cycle event, in my first season doing triathlon as Ireland’s flag bearer in the Triathlon World Championship, I crashed head-first into a wall after breaking too late trying to negotiate a hairpin bend. The bend had come all too suddenly, and so too did the wall.

  In complete shock, and still driven by adrenalin, I remounted the bike with my front wheel buckled and forks bent. I managed about a mile, weaving from side to side with fellow triathletes passing me and staring in disbelief at this crazy bloodied Irishman still riding on, like a drunkard trying to stay upright. I was oblivious that my bike and I were both badly banged up. I was soon lifted off the bike by two gendarmes and placed in the back of an ambulance. The tone of a siren of a French ambulance is a sound that still haunts my ears to this day.

  I was rushed to the famous St Roch Hospital in Nice. The journey down the twisty mountain took an eternity. Sixteen stitches to my head, a broken collarbone and concussion were the end products of inexperience and applying the brakes too hard. If I had to take a driving test for cycling a bike on a straight road I would have passed, but I would have failed a test on a twisty road outright. At the time of the accident I was in 36th position and moving swiftly through the field, only for the accident to strike. Perhaps I was too young and too driven by adrenalin to make it a successful day.

  My mother Thecla waited among the crowds at the finish line on the Ruhl Plage, on the Promenade des Anglais, for her son to finish. Sirens blared, everyone babbled in French, German or Italian. She knew something was amiss when I did not come across the finish line in the top twenty. She strained her eyes to see into the distance and each athlete looked like her son until they loomed closer. Panic bells started ringing. She enquired. Nobody knew. Eventually she was told that I, “Dossard 254”, had an accident and was hospitalised in the nearby St Roch Hospital. I was in pain and badly beaten up when my mother visited.

  Later that night she met the winner of the race, Mark Allen of the US. He would go on to win a record seven Nice Triathlon World Championship titles and six Hawaii Ironman titles. The following day, Mark Allen visited me in the hospital and gave me a good luck card. He encouraged me to stick with the sport. That meant so much from one of the greats of triathlon.

  The next day, Justin Nelson and Brendan O’Reilly and a dozen or so of the Irish competitors and their friends visited as well. RTÉ did not have much to cheer about. They went back to Dublin empty handed. Maybe Hawaii was a better option after all.

  After three days in St Roch Hospital, I flew into Dublin Airport assisted by my mother. Instead of going straight home to Limerick, it was arranged to admit me to the Bon Secours Hospital in Glasnevin, Dublin to undergo a full medical with a CT scan, followed by a period of medical supervision because of the head injury. It was while in the hospital in Dublin, looking out a window each day for a week, that I decided to give triathlon a real go.

  Regardless of the setback I had in Nice, irrespective of what my parents thought of this demanding and dangerous sport their son was involved in, neither they nor I had control over where it was taking me. I was gripped by the triathlon bug. I came to learn years later that it’s not only athletes at the top of the sport who train day in and day out to reach peak shape, but the triathlon bug is a worldwide phenomenon. People from all walks of life, and of varying ages and abilities, get hooked on triathlon as a lifestyle and many get so gripped by it that it controls their lives; they become so obsessive that it is all they live for. In extreme cases, some allow the triathlon to upset the balance between family, work and other important aspects of their lives.

  4

  The 1985 All-Ireland Triathlon and My Ticket to the Hawaii Ironman

  After a full week in the Bon Secours Hospital, I was home in Limerick with my arm in a sling for five weeks, under medical orders not to do any training for eight weeks. With plenty of time to kill, I started formulating training plans for the following year. I was thinking big: the plan was to defend my All-Ireland Triathlon title, and to compete with the very best in the business at the European Championship and World Championship events.

  When I made my decision in the hospital that I was going to give triathlon a real go, a few things were clear to me: I had raw athletic talent but my swimming was a big weakness, and I was a danger to myself and others on the bike. I would have to learn quickly how to swim and cycle if I was to be a force internationally in this demanding sport. But I had a problem: in 1984 there was no 50-metre pool in Ireland.

  In Limerick, there was St Enda’s Sports Complex – now sadly closed – and Roxboro swimming pool, which is now also gone. These were the two swimming pools open to the public in the city. But there was another problem: there was no lane swimming. The Masters Swimming Club was not yet in existence. The elite Limerick Swim Squad, headed by Gerry Ryan and Mick Mulcair, trained at St Enda’s each weekday from 6.00 a.m. to 8.00 a.m., but that was reserved for the serious competitive swimmers.

  It was only in 1986 that it became possible for me to join in their training. I had to earn my stripes and gain some proficiency in swimming before being welcomed into their close-knit fraternity, where the average age of the young competitive swimmer was 14 and I was then a 24-year-old runner turned triathlete, with no formal swimming background.

  The public open hours at St Enda’s were a quagmire. Rather than swimming, people stood or walked about the shallow end. Those who swam did a width from side to side, and then stood by the poolside for minutes before attempting to cross over again. The only reasonable time to go, when the pool was not jammed full, was from 10.00 p.m. to 11.00 p.m., for what was termed “adult hour”.

  The truth was, in the 1980s, very few people, with the exception of competitive swimmers, could swim properly in Ireland. A visit to a swimming pool was more of a social occasion, a good place for a chit-chat and dip followed by a scrub in the hot shower. To see a good swimmer glide up and down the pool was rare.

  With no organised swimming, my strategy each night was to get in the pool, keep the head down and belt up and down like there was no tomorrow, trying to avoid crashing into people and just dealing with the random black eye, bloody lip or kick in the ribs encountered when a far larger man doing the breaststroke kicked a foot into me.

  In those early days I surely caused some consternation, with my main target being to cover 80 to 90 lengths of the 25-metre pool – a mile and a quarter to a mile and a half – in the 50 minutes before the “get out” whistle was blown at 10 minutes to the hour.

  Being eager to squeeze in another few laps, I always pretended that I didn’t hear the whistle, and Paul Earls, the pool attendant, would have to tap me on the head to clear me out, sometimes being angry with me, other times giving me a big grin.

  My swimming practice in 1984, and most of my training for triathlon, was more about survival, but at the same time it was ideal practice for the start of the swimming event in the World Championships or Hawaii Ironman, when 1,800 people charge into the water at the same time, all heading in the same direction. Imagine 1,800 people charging in and churning the water, jostling and fighting for space, two arms and two legs swinging, adrenalin pumping, all go at a frantic rate. Nowadays, with the exception of the Hawaii Ironman, events are begun in wave starts, with a limited number of people allowed in each.

  Peter Snow was the manager of St Enda’s Sports Complex in 1984. I badly needed him on my side. I met with Peter and repeatedly petitioned him to assist in making structured swimming training a reality. I requested a lane to be roped off for distance swimming. Peter agreed, but there was a catch. His dilemma was that most people paying to
come in to use the pool could not swim a full length, with many not being confident to swim in the deep end. They mainly loitered in the shallow end and attempted widths. If Peter put down a rope for me and a couple of hardy triathletes then he would have been cutting off his nose to spite himself, as the 50 to 60 recreational users would not have been very impressed – and that was putting it mildly.

  In the end he agreed to rope off one lane, the one furthest to the left, and he placed a sign poolside stating, “Reserved for Distance Swimming”.

  The one catch which I had to work around was that this rope was only down during the hour 10.00 p.m. to 11.00 p.m. It was a start, and beggars can’t be choosers. But it meant putting lights on my bicycle and cycling the three miles there and back in the darkness. At least on the very wet or wintry nights my dad would drive me up, and after a few trips he ended up getting into the pool himself and swimming a few lengths.

  The other step in my triathlon plan was to join Limerick Cycling Club. Top Limerick cyclist Gearóid Costelloe, who won a stage of the Rás Tailteann in Tralee in 1984, introduced me to many of the intricacies of cycling: how to glue a tubular tyre, or a tub, as they are called, onto the wheel; how to distribute body weight when cornering; how to use the breaks so you won’t go flying over the handlebars; pedalling technique; and bike set-up and position on the machine. It was all new to me, but I couldn’t learn fast enough.

  Arthur Caball, who owned the Burgerland fast-food restaurant in Limerick’s William Street, was a sports fanatic. He had followed my exploits, coming from nowhere to win my first All-Ireland Triathlon. Arthur met me one evening and outlined a proposition that I found hard to refuse. He wanted to sponsor me £4,000 in assistance, and all I had to do was to endorse and wear the logo of Burgerland on my competition sportswear. I arrived home excited. But my parents were having none of it. There was no way their son would be paid to wear “Burgerland” on his kit.