The first and last Irishman to win a European athletics title for England

When Paul Howard first met Jim Hogan the sense of misunderstanding was entirely mutual. It happens sometimes and still does and especially when it comes to that talk about representing your so-called club, or your country, for that matter.

“He showed up in the yard one day, cool as you like. I thought he was lost. He was wearing glasses and looked like a teenager. I knew some bloke was coming down from Dublin to interview me but sweet Jesus, when I saw your man I had to laugh. He couldn’t have come at a worse time …

“So we got talking easy enough and it went well. He was on top of his game and understood a bit about athletics … it was only lately I found out that he had done very well for himself as a writer. More luck to him, he was a smashin’ young fellow and I hope he makes a fortune.”

Jim Hogan wrote that about Paul Howard in his autobiography The Irishman Who Ran for England, published in 2008, a beautiful record of his running career and his life, which ended in January 2015 close to his home in Knocklong in Co Limerick.

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Now read on …

“He fetches two chairs from the kitchen, sets them down in the yard and tells you to sit as comfortably as the hard surface will allow, because Jim Hogan’s life story is long, lads, make no mistake about it, it’s long. It’s long and hectic and angry and inspiring and expletive-filled and wonderful …

“The splenetic spirit that raged in Jim Hogan as a young man still burns strongly at 67. Those blazer-wearing bastards in the Irish Athletics Association, he wants to tell you about them. How he ended up running for Britain just to spite them, how, on the proudest day of his life, when he won the marathon at the 1966 European Championships, it was God Save The Queen that he stood too and the Union Jack that was raised. He doesn’t regret it for a minute.”

Paul Howard wrote that about Jim Hogan in The Sunday Tribune in July 2000, and if you think about, what it means to represent your club or your country, then maybe we should still tread carefully.

Sometimes too the best stories of this generation have been told already. and the fun part is in telling of them again.

There is a line from the song Brownsville Girl lost on Bob Dylan’s 1980s album Knocked Out Loaded where he says the only thing we knew for sure about Henry Porter is that his name wasn’t Henry Porter.

The only thing we knew for sure about Jim Hogan is that his name wasn’t Jim Hogan.

He was born Jim Cregan, in Croom hospital in Limerick, on May 28th, 1933, and if not one of Ireland’s most successful distance runners, he was certainly one of our most enigmatic.

So pissed off was he with the then Irish athletics federation, the Amateur Athletic Union of Éire (AAUE), particularly after his 1964 Olympic experience, Hogan turned to the British athletics federation, given he was already living and working in London for years.

If you watch Kon Ichikawa’s 1964 documentary Tokyo Olympiad you will see some of the greatest sporting footage ever shot. Tokyo was awarded the 1940 Games, but we all know what happened then. So when Tokyo’s turn came, the organisers were intent on documenting their Games, motivated by the standard, politically and aesthetically, set by Leni Riefenstahl with her celebration of the 1936 Berlin Olympics.

They offered the job to Akira Kurosawa, whose plans were rejected as too expensive, so they turned to the other great name of Japan cinema: Ichikawa avoided the political rituality of Riefenstahl, and instead indulged in the idiosyncrasy of the sporting events.

For Ichikawa, the Olympics were “a symbol of human aspiration”, and he interpreted that “aspiration” as going far beyond achievement in the sporting arena.

Nowhere is that more evident than in his footage of the men’s marathon. On October 24th, a field of 68 runners from 35 countries set out from the Olympic stadium on the out-and-back course to Tobitakyu-machi, and at the turning point, Abebe Bikila of Ethiopia had dropped the field except for Ireland’s Jim Hogan.

Bikila had won the Olympic marathon four years previously, running barefoot in Rome. In Tokyo he wore brand new Pumas and long white socks, and proved an even more convincing winner, with a then world record of 2:12.11. Ichikawa’s camera focuses more on the chasing runners. It shows Hogan coming to a halt at 23 miles, trying in vain to run on, before sitting down on the kerbside and gesturing with his hand for a drink.

If he’d somehow summoned the energy to go on Hogan would surely have won a medal.

Then just two years later Hogan made his amends when winning the 1966 European Championship marathon in Budapest. Only this time he was wearing an English vest.

It was in 1960, when first moving to England to find work, he changed his surname to Hogan: over the next four years he made several international appearances for Ireland, before he truly conquered the marathon distance in Budapest, winning in 2:20:04 – still the only Irishman to win a European Championship gold medal.

“It was a bloody disgrace that our top marathon runner had to declare for England to achieve success. And he got fiercely criticised for it. History will show that between Ron Delany’s gold in 1956 and Eamonn Coghlan’s gold in 1983, Jim Hogan from Limerick was the only Irishman to win an athletics gold medal in a major championship. Matter a damn what singlet he wore. It was a triumph for Hogan and for Ireland, but few were filling to acknowledge it.”

David Guiney wrote that about Jim Hogan, and the rest is Irish athletics history.

In the preface to Hogan’s book, British distance runner David Bedford, who despite breaking world records never won a championships gold medal, said: “The one thing I always said about Jim is that if the swear-words were taken out he would be a mute.”

Funny enough Hogan’s book is swear-free except for one sentence: “I feared no opponent. If you’re looking around you at the start of a race worrying about them, you’ll win fuck-all.”

Thinking ahead of the 2022 European Athletics Championship beginning in Munich on Monday week, Delany won 1,500m bronze in 1958, Coghlan won 1,500m silver in 1978, and a big shout out to Mark Carroll for his 5,000m bronze in 1998.

There is and will always be Sonia O’Sullivan’s three European gold medals, still no Irishman has won a gold medal on this stage.

Unless of course his name is Jim Hogan.