AT THE END of a week in which he finally got his hands on an Olympic medal, Rob Heffernan appeared as a guest on the Late Late Show last night.
The 2013 world champion in the 50km walk finished fourth at the 2012 Olympics in London, but after gold medal winner Sergey Kirdyapkin was found guilty of a doping violation, Heffernan was upgraded to third place and a bronze medal, which he received at a ceremony in his native Cork on Thursday night.
It was a long road for Heffernan to get to European, World and Olympic success in the latter stages of his career, and making ends meet along the way wasn’t always straightforward, as he explained to Ryan Tubridy last night when recalling how he went to the Canary Islands to train after recovering from two hernia injuries in 2006:
I went to the Canaries. Back focused, I was fixed and completely driven, kind of like, ‘Now if I do things right I’m going to have a really good career.’
“I had no money. Scraped together, went on a cheap package holiday but found a place to train. Then when I was over there, there’s no tax on anything. I lived on the bare minimum, went over with a buddy just to train and was kind of like, ‘The fags are half-price here.’
“All of my family, loads of them smoke, a lot of my friends smoke. So I bought 5,000 cigarettes and 11 DVDs that people were interested in.”
When asked by Tubridy what kind of DVDs he was referring to, Heffernan said: “DVDs that people… there was a demand for them. [There was] no internet.
“I had all of these offloaded by the time I came home so this was going to pay for me to go on another warm-weather training camp to the Canaries. ‘This is great, I’m going to get my training done, good environment, it’s sunny.’ Not [to make] a few quid, just to cover my training camp.
I came back into Shannon [Airport]. A couple of hundred pensioners going to the Canaries during the winter and a fella arrives in a tracksuit with a skinhead and a gearbag. I stood out a mile so the customs pulled me in.
“It was like Legoland, taking the boxes out. I was just so embarrassed. I went home completely deflated. It was just a gamble and I lost all the money, lost all the merchandise that I purchased.”
Heffernan also had an admirably positive take on how missing out on the honour of being on the podium in London helped him to become a world champion a year later.
“My performance was brilliant and I used it then to go forward to win the world championships the next year,” Heffernan said. “If I won a medal in London… We went to the bar — ‘The Bag Of Nails’ it was called — after the race. I could have stayed there for a month if I had a medal.
“But I didn’t, I came home and it kicked me on for the next year and I won a world title. I don’t look back on it any bit bitter. I think it molded me for next year and I was going to get retribution in Russia. That was my motivation and I went on and I won gold. It’s all part of the journey.”
