He's possibly just days away from winning an Olympic bronze medal, only Rob Heffernan doesn't know how to celebrate it – or if he'll even celebrate at all.
It is part of the slightly hollow feeling which comes when athletes are banned retrospectively for doping, but then it’s certainly better late than never: “Yeah, of course, it’s huge,” says Heffernan. “There’s nothing bigger in any sport than an Olympic medal.
“But, saying that, I’m just so busy with what I’m doing at the moment. I’m putting so much focus into going to Rio being able to challenge for a medal. To go to any Olympics able to challenge for a medal is a huge thing. I train twice a day. I sleep during the afternoon, and I have four kids. So I really haven’t got time to worry about what’s going on with this right now.”
Indeed while winning that Olympic medal retrospectively could possibly be the biggest deal of his life, Heffernan just can’t deal with it right now. On Friday, the Court of Arbitration for Sport (Cas) will hear the final case between the IAAF and the six athletes who were issued with “selective disqualification of results” by the Russian Anti-doping Agency (Rusada).
If one of those athletes, Sergey Kirdyapkin, loses his case then Heffernan will be automatically promoted to the Olympic bronze medal from the 50km walk in London 2012, where he finished fourth – and which Kirdyapkin originally won, only to later fail a doping test.
It’s actually happened to Heffernan before, when he was retrospectively awarded a bronze medal from the 20km walk at the 2010 European Championships, when another Russian gold medal winner later failed a doping test.
“Yeah, I’ve gone through it already, getting a medal from Barcelona. And they got my name wrong on that medal, spelled it ‘Hefferman’, I think, as if to just rub salt in the wound. And that moment in London is gone too, obviously, not only for me, but it’s gone for the tens of thousands of people who were watching me out there and who were watching the race back home. But that’s life. What can you do?
“When I finish my career, and have time to think about all of this, I might get bitter then. But, because I’m still moving forward and still trying to be motivated, to be the best, I don’t have the time and energy to be thinking about what they’re doing in Russia.”
Part of the problem for Heffernan – speaking at the release of the Road to Rio video series from sponsors Nissan – is that despite all the doping revelations coming out of Russia in recent months, particularly in race walking, that Olympic bronze still isn’t in his hands, almost four years later.
“There’s a part of my brain that’s thinking, ‘I’m definitely going to get it’. And then there’s a part of me going, ‘just give me the medal and I’m going to run away before they take it back off me’. So there’s a part of my brain doesn’t want to deal with all of it, in case something goes wrong. But then I think, ‘no, no, I’m going to get it, and that’s it’.
“But I really thought that it would be done and dusted by December. I was talking to Marian (his wife) about it, at the time, and thought we might have a night out after it, tie in Christmas with it. But now Marian is going, ‘you’re not to celebrate it at all this year, you celebrate it after Rio’. So after that I decided I just needed to completely forget about it. I was dreaming about it, and it totally consumed my mindset.”
So, whether the Cas verdict is delivered in the coming days or weeks, Heffernan wants no open-top bus, no media appearances, and certainly no belated podium presentation – and the only talk of Olympic medals will be about Rio, not London. He will already make history in Rio as the first Irish athlete to compete in five summer Olympics, and when all that’s over then ideally he can be thinking about how to celebrate two Olympic medals, not just the one from London.
