Rob Heffernan finally to have his day at Olympic medal presentation

There is something cruel and unusual about being presented with an Olympic bronze medal on a dark Thursday night in November at the City Hall in Cork, but then these are rare and unprecedented times in world sport. Nothing is always or forever, it seems.

Not that Rob Heffernan will necessarily see it that way. All the talk will be of its being the first Olympic medal to be presented in Ireland, albeit more than four years too late – or 1,545 days to be exact.

Or that it couldn't possibly be the same as being presented with it inside the London Olympic Stadium on the evening of August 11th, 2012, when instead Heffernan watched from the stands, having originally finished fourth in the 50km walk earlier that day, out around The Mall in front of Buckingham Palace.

In ways, though, the timing is irrelevant, because at the age of 38, Heffernan has only ever being motivated by winning medals and he has been working towards this moment for as long as he can remember. It doesn’t matter how or when his Olympic medal is presented as long as it still comes with a silky ribbon and he gets to keep it for life.

In other ways it may feel even better late than never, because it has taken took nearly four years since London, four years during which all the doping suspicions about the original gold medal winner Russian Sergey Kirdyapkin were proven true. He was eventually stripped of his Olympic title in March, though for a while it seemed as if he might get away with it.

Bizarrely, Heffernan has been here before, as he was retrospectively awarded a bronze for the 20km walk at the 2010 European Championships after another Russian gold medal winner failed a doping test.

With his gold medal from the 2013 World Championships in Moscow, he is now the only Irish man with medals from the three “majors” of athletes, sharing the honour with the only Irish woman – and fellow Cork athlete – Sonia O’Sullivan.

“I know from my own experience how these things work. After all the hysteria and excitement that comes with winning any medal, it’s only later, when you’re on your own and away from it all, that the satisfaction of it all really sinks it. And I’ll still get that feeling after all this,” he told me recently.

Real satisfaction

“I remember long after winning the gold medal at the World Championships in Moscow in 2013, it was later on, sitting at home at night on my own, that the real satisfaction kicks in, that you’ve done your absolute best and got the reward. The medal is really only the symbol of it all, some acknowledgement, but the real satisfaction is within.”

The realness of that satisfaction is unquestionable: no Olympic medals are easily won, yet few athletes will have worked harder for theirs. Heffernan details the extent of that journey in his new autobiography, Walking Tall, released later this week, but anyone close to him will tell you how ceaselessly challenging that journey has been. Nothing ever came easy, and Heffernan wouldn't have wanted it any other way.

I’ve told the story before about meeting him for the first time: we were on the top floor of the West Edmonton Mall the night after Heffernan had competed in the 20km walk at the 2001 World Championships, and he was trying to bluff our way past two big Canadian bouncers.

Looking about 13, he faced up to one of the bouncers. “Come on, like,” he said, with that beautifully moaning Cork accent. “I’m after finishing 14th in the 20km walk. We’re just like having a little celebration.”

The bouncers looked at each other and parted. Straight away I got the impression this was a young athlete going places.

However, just two years later, his career hit the first of several stumbling blocks: he didn’t qualify for the 2003 World Championships, in Paris. Two years later, in Helsinki, he was disqualified. By then he had a young son, Cathal, and was laying bricks to help pay the bills.

His breakthrough didn’t come until the 2007 World Championships in Osaka, where he finished sixth. Then a year later, at the Beijing Olympics, he was leading at 14km and finished eighth.

Tragic accident

Then came the 2011 World Championships in Daegu, when, in the form of his life, Heffernan must have believed his time to win a medal had finally come. Three days before the start he got a call to say his mother, Maureen, one his keenest supporters, had just died in a tragic domestic accident. He got the next flight home.

"I'll just have to keep going," he told us in London in 2012, the medals seemingly decided already. "It's just hard, it's hard. I wanted to win an Olympic medal. It's been my dream." Rob Heffernan's medal will be jointly presented by the Olympic Council of Ireland (OCI) and Lord Mayor of Cork Cllr Des Cahill at Cork City Hall on Thursday at 7pm. More information from robsmedal@corkcity.ie