Born to Perform Page 6
6
A Sponsorship Controversy
After winning my second successive All-Ireland Triathlon in Sligo, I was on a high. I took the following day off, my first rest day in six months. Even the day before the race, I ran for one hour in the morning, swam for one mile and cycled for one hour in the evening.
There were only eighteen weeks to the Hawaii Ironman and, while I was only one full year training and competing in triathlon, I had no fears of the challenges ahead. I had never cycled further than 60 miles, yet now 112 miles was my challenge. I had never raced a full marathon, and in four months’ time I would face a marathon in a furnace of heat that I had never experienced, not even in the heartland of the US when I was a student.
I contacted Con O’Callaghan, the president of the Irish Triathlon Association. Con was very politically involved in the development of the sport in Europe and he served as the inaugural chairman of the European Triathlon Union (ETU). He was a sport administrator and recreational triathlete, based at the House of Sport in Upper Malone Road, Belfast. Triathlon was growing fast, and was particularly strong in Germany, France, the Netherlands and Britain, and there was a lot of political wrangling in those days, with the powerhouse of the sport, the US, pulling the sport in one direction and the ETU also fighting its cause.
This was all very important on a larger scale, because the sport of triathlon was like a ship on rough water. It needed stability and Con O’Callaghan worked tirelessly in those early years to steady the ship. If triathlon was ever to be a mainstream global sport it needed to have its own world governing body, and it would be another four years before the International Triathlon Union (ITU) staged its first international distance World Championships – in Avignon, France in 1989 – and fifteen years before triathlon became an Olympic sport, at the Sydney Olympics in 2000.
My only request to Con was to enquire if the Irish Triathlon Association could fund my way to any international events, in preparation for Hawaii. Perhaps, as a young 23-year-old, I was naive. The Hawaii Ironman was a financially lucrative event, and the most successful triathlon of them all, but Con O’Callaghan had no interest in the bit players. It did not concern him if I needed high quality races to improve my standard. He was a sports administrator and just another politician within the sport. I was on my own regarding preparing for Hawaii.
The European Championship Triathlon took place in Denmark on September 1, a few weeks before I was scheduled to travel to Hawaii. First, with the Ironman coming up, I had to arrange to take time off work for another event and then there was the concern of how I would fund the trip, and, indeed, how I would get there. Fellow Limerick Triathlon Club man Michael Carroll from Roscrea, whose best placing in the All-Ireland Triathlon was tenth, agreed to drive me to Denmark in his old Renault. The logistics of it were far from ideal. First, fitting two road bikes into the car was a challenge. Then came the drive to Dublin for a boat from Dublin to Holyhead, followed by an eight-hour drive to Harwick, where we boarded the boat for a twenty-hour trip to Esbjerg in Denmark, to arrive in Aabenraa after another two hours in the car.
Arriving in Aabenraa the day before the race, hardly able to walk with a stiff back, Michael and I jumped into the sea – only to get out as quickly as possible as we were both stung all over by large jellyfish.
The following day, I faced the European Triathlon Championships in a subdued mood, knowing that straight after finishing we would have the long haul back home, where, with no rest, I would return to work. I was deflated, exhausted and too drained to gallop. This was before the race.
In any case, in my first European Championship Triathlon I crossed the finish line in twelfth place overall, three minutes outside the bronze medal, wondering what the result would have been had the funding and support structure been in place for me to fly from Shannon. At the awards ceremony after the race, Con O’Callaghan approached me and said, “Not a bad effort.”
I walked away shaking my head, knowing that he had no interest in helping me reach the top of triathlon internationally. My best Half Ironman time of three hours and fifty-seven minutes would have won me that European title by four minutes, but there could be no regrets as it was all part of participating in a sport in its infancy.
Nonetheless, if Ireland was to have a presence on the world stage and get its top performers on victory podiums in international competitions, serious structures would have to be put in place. The approach of those governing the sport would have to change. Sometimes such people get confused and use their positions of power to self-serve and help their own climb up the political ladder. The administrators and sports governing bodies are there to govern and run the sport, and serve the elite athletes. They must always put the athlete first and facilitate them performing at the highest level. Many administrators have it backwards, and play the big and mighty, treating the athletes like dirt as if the athletes should be at their beck and call.
Working at several World Championships and the past five Olympic Games as a backroom staff member, I always put the athlete first. They need to be given every opportunity plus the platform and support to enable them to perform at their best.
When I travelled with teams in the early 1990s, the administrators and medical staff often got priority seating and accommodation, and this infuriated me. As an athlete, I saw firsthand how athletes were treated and I had a good yardstick when I travelled to international competitions and shared notes with athletes from other countries. The “blazer brigade”, as I called them – the officials and administrators on junkets for their own gain – are thankfully in the minority nowadays, as sport on the international stage has become such big business. It is highly competitive and results are what count.
After the European Triathlon Championships in Denmark, I was interviewed for a feature article in the 1985 Triathlon Ireland Annual magazine, and my quotes at that time summed up my sentiment:
My experience in Denmark showed me that an Irish triathlete striving to reach the top is only bashing his head against a brick wall in comparison to the opportunities afforded to my counterparts on the continent. I was amazed to hear a Swedish competitor who finished six places behind me say that he was a full-time triathlete who spends upwards of seven hours training daily and belongs to a heavily sponsored team along with [getting] support from the national triathlon federation. My feeling from Denmark was that the standard will continue to rise and unless Ireland’s top performers are given some assistance in terms of sponsorship or financial assistance then our standard in top competition will drop even lower.
In ways, nothing changed for many years, and the ongoing dilemma for some athletes is the same now as it was then. Athletes need most support on their way to the top. Once he or she has reached the top ten in the world in his or her chosen sport, the Government steps in and gives out the maximum funding of €40,000 per year – but the athlete who reaches that level already has commercial sponsorship deals, and prize money to boot. It is at the stage when the athlete shows potential, and is on the way up, that finance and coaching and medical support are most critical.
In my seven years as Irish triathlon champion, I never had any input from the Irish Triathlon Association. The association worked on an administrative level only, and it felt to me as if the athletes were inconsequential, mere bit players. That was most unfortunate as there was so much potential. In the 1980s, Ireland had international-level potential in Ann Kearney, Tom Heaney, Noel Munnis, Kevin Morgan, Erwin Cameron, Eamonn McConvey and Eugene Galbraith – all very accomplished athletes, but they had to fend for themselves.
The net result in any sport where there is no performance structure in place is that top results do not happen. World-class high-performance sport in the 21st century is now an intensive, exhausting occupation where athletes are fully embroiled in sophisticated training regimes, utilising scientifically developed technologies that create long-term physiological and personality changes, as they progress through the higher levels of the
sport to the ultimate prize of an Olympic gold medal. Lord Sebastian Coe, a double Olympic 1,500-metre champion and one of the finest sports administrators around, is a man I greatly admire. I meet him on occasion through my work, and I always listen intently to what he has to say. He has his finger on the pulse. When the Great Britain Olympic Team, of which I was a backroom member, had a hugely successful Olympics in Beijing in 2008, Coe stated:
What we have witnessed here is the amalgam of good administration within governing bodies, world-class coaching, elevated levels of funding and hungry and motivated competitors. If you bring these four things all together you tend to get people up on the rostrum. It is very important that we now recognise that there is no happy accident out there in the sports arena.
I had learned a big lesson in Denmark. Never again was I going to travel halfway around the world to arrive so tired that a day in bed was all I was able for, not a championship event.
Hawaii was indeed more than halfway around the world. When I looked for it on the world atlas it took me ages to find it: there it was, way off from the west coast of America, a speck of small dots. It was going to be another long journey to get there, maybe an Ironman journey in itself, even before the big event.
I was keen to know what the actual deal was going to be in terms of the “all expenses paid” trip to Hawaii. I reasoned that, to be able to do justice and represent Ireland in this toughest of events, I should get out to Hawaii at least two weeks before the race, to get over jet lag and the nine-hour time difference, plus to acclimatise to the heat and humidity. Everyone I spoke to agreed: “Wouldn’t that be nice, two full weeks in paradise?”
What they didn’t realise was that I was effectively going to jump into the sea and swim two and a half miles, jump on my bike and cycle from Limerick to Dublin, and run the Dublin City Marathon – all on the hottest summer’s day you’ve ever seen in Ireland, plus another twenty degrees. An all-expenses-paid trip to Hawaii back in 1985 was the ultimate trip and a free ride for some, but not for me.
I contacted Justin Nelson in RTÉ: “Justin, Gerard Hartmann here. Yes, the training is going great. I’m just phoning to find out what date has been organised for travelling to Hawaii?”
The Hawaii Ironman was scheduled for Saturday, October 26. I came off the phone scratching my head and totally confused. The plan was for me and the Irish contingent of seven athletes to depart from Dublin Airport on Tuesday, October 22, with the RTÉ personnel of Justin Nelson, Brendan O’Reilly and camera crew. The planned itinerary would involve almost two days of travel to get to this speck of an island on the Thursday, two days before the race.
I was fuming. Denmark and the Half Ironman weeks earlier did not seem too bad after all. I phoned my good friend in Sligo, Pat Curley. Pat completely understood my plight and put in a few phone calls for me, but they fell on deaf ears. The budget for the RTÉ programme televising the 1985 Hawaii Ironman had been decided and there was apparently no room for manoeuvre.
I put pen to paper and wrote to the Irish event sponsors Premier Dairies and their head man Frank Nolan. Premier Dairies had pumped over £20,000 into the Sligo All-Ireland Triathlon, as they were its key sponsors along with Puma. The requirement was that every competitor in the All-Ireland Triathlon had to wear a competition shirt emblazoned with a large Premier Dairies logo on the front and a smaller Puma logo. Premier Dairies agreed to sponsor us for the Ironman and the deal would be the same as for the triathlon: the Irish competitors would wear the gear provided and live by the mantra “He who pays the piper calls the tune.”
That was fine, but I was the star athlete. Nice, the previous year, had been a watershed, when I had ended up in hospital because of an accident. So, this time I risked my trip and made it clear to them that I would not compete in Hawaii unless a reasonable deal was struck to fund me to go to Hawaii two weeks beforehand. I had no reply to the letter I sent to Frank Nolan at Premier Dairies or the copy of it I’d sent on to RTÉ. I’d kept a photocopy, so I sat down and put pen to paper again and sent off the two letters as if the previous had never been sent, only this time registering both. I reasoned that if these boys were messing with me, while I was breaking my arse training three and four times per day, then they were fooling no one. After a couple of weeks waiting for a reply, I phoned Frank Nolan and explained that if Premier Dairies did not fully fund my trip to Hawaii on the earlier date that I requested, I would seek additional sponsorship myself to fund it. Their loss was going to be someone else’s gain, and there would be red faces galore for all the wrong reasons.
I knew John O’Donnell, one of the stalwarts of Limerick Athletic Club, who worked for many years with Guinness. John had qualified for the 1948 Olympic Games as a sprinter but missed out due to administrative issues. He knew firsthand how vital it was to travel early and acclimatise. John made an appointment for me to meet Guinness’s head of marketing PJ McAlister.
PJ and I struck a deal: Guinness would fund me £2,000 and in return I would wear the Guinness logo on my competition kit. It did not matter that, back then − and to this day − I was one of the few Irishmen who had never even tasted Guinness, never mind drank a full pint of the black stuff. What ructions would develop did not become apparent until a couple of days before the race in Hawaii.
After what happened in Nice the year before, my mother was not going to let her 23-year-old son travel to the remote island of Hawaii on his own. The day before travelling, I cycled from Limerick to Kilkee in Clare and back, a full 112 miles – the same distance I was going to cycle in Hawaii, though of course I knew the experiences would be worlds apart. Cycling for five and a half hours on a wet September day in the west of Ireland bore no similarity to cycling 112 miles in temperatures close to 100°F across lava fields on a windswept paradise island. After getting off the bike in Limerick, I then ran thirteen miles. I came home, had a good feed and spent another hour taking the bike apart and packing it safely into a big box padded with Styrofoam that had been kindly made for me by a factory in Askeaton, without charge.
The following morning my mother and I flew from Shannon to New York and on to Minneapolis, where we had to stop over for the night. Next stop the following day was Los Angeles Airport. Looking out the window of the airport, my thoughts went back to the previous summer and the Los Angeles Olympics, and I thought that if John Treacy could win a silver medal in the heat of California I should be able to survive the heat of Hawaii. The flight from mainland US to Hawaii was all of five hours, almost the same distance as from Shannon to New York. “Lord,” I remember thinking, “these Hawaii Islands really are in the middle of the ocean, actually the most remote group of islands in the whole world.”
When we stopped at Honolulu Airport we had a three-hour wait before boarding our next flight to the Big Island. I was jumping out of my skin and eager to get out for a run. I had my running shoes on and I had a singlet and shorts in my hand luggage – ever the athlete, always ready for a run. I changed in the toilets and went out squinting into the glaring midday sun, as I had not even thought of the need for sunglasses. Before even starting to run, I was soaked in sweat. The heat was like a furnace as I ran laps of a car park at the airport in the 95°F heat for some 45 minutes.
We arrived in Kona Airport in darkness and waited at the luggage carousel for our luggage to arrive. With the little airport deserted, we realised we had arrived empty handed, with the exception of small carry-on bags. We were told that our luggage and my bike had to be re-routed and would probably arrive in the next day or so. Whatever about plans to get out and train on the course, at least I had my running shoes and sweaty gear − fortunately so, as the bike and luggage took four days to arrive. We were given $300 by the airline to purchase some clothes and necessities, and of course the first thing I did was buy a pair of swimming goggles and togs so I could get swimming in the warm Pacific.
It was utter paradise. A swim in the pristine clear sea every morning at 7.00 a.m., followed by a breakfast of jumbo pancakes w
ith maple syrup, and mango and papaya so fresh and tasty it made my mouth water for hours. Training and acclimatisation were going well, almost too well, I suspected. On the Saturday, a week before the race, I swam for an hour in the morning, covering most of the swim route, and straight after I ran 21 miles in 2 hours and 10 minutes. Later in the day, I cycled a hard 40 miles, averaging 23 miles per hour.
The following morning, neither my mother nor I were fit to get out of bed. We both woke up with the same symptoms: bad headache, feeling very hot then very cold, weak legs and sore throat. Walking from the bed to the bathroom was an effort. We were jinxed. We both spent four days in bed, and when my sister Leonie arrived from Dublin days before the event, hoping to have a few relaxing days on a paradise island with her mother and brother, she found us isolated and quarantined in our hotel bedroom; we could only speak to her on the phone.
On Thursday, October 24, two days before the race, I woke up feeling better and I went out and jogged three miles. The RTÉ crew and group of athletes had arrived in from Ireland. I met with Justin Nelson and Brendan O’Reilly, and I explained my plight. I had been sick and did not know if I had the energy to participate. Brendan O’Reilly sat me down and explained to me that in 1956 he had made the high jump qualifying height, three times in fact, for the Olympic Games in Melbourne. He was on an athletic scholarship at the University of Michigan, and each day he waited for a letter or telegraph to arrive from Ireland, notifying him that he was going to the Olympic Games. When eventually the telegraph did arrive, it read: “Trip cancelled; insufficient funds”.