Couples united in their passion for success

ATHLETICS: Romance is often not far from the sports field as highly driven athletes fall for each other

MAYBE EMIL Zátopek is to blame.

The man they called the Human Locomotive – the first and only athlete to win gold in the 5,000m, the 10,000m, and the marathon, in the same Olympics – set

himself such high standards in sport that inevitably it spilled over into regular life and, more specifically, the woman with whom he shared it.

When at the 1948 Olympics in London, the great Czech runner – who first made his name by winning the 10,000m and finished a close second in the 5,000m – was asked if he would ever marry: “Only when I meet a woman who matches my passion for athletics,” Zátopek replied, with his distinctive hungry grin.

As it happened Zátopek did meet a woman in London – fellow Czech athlete Dana Ingrova, who had finished seventh in the javelin. Perhaps there was something cosmic about that meeting, as they were born on the same day (September 19th, 1922), and then in Helsinki, as husband and wife, they won Olympic gold medals on the same day (July 24th, 1952).

Zátopek claimed his first, winning the 5,000m – and after the medal ceremony rushed over to his wife, just as she was about to start the javelin, showing her his gold. “I’ll keep it with me for luck,” she said, and with her first effort, threw 50.47m, an Olympic record, and enough to win a gold medal of her own.

Afterwards, Zátopek mischievously claimed credit for her medal, that he had inspired it, to which Ingrova naturally took some offence: “What?” she replied. “All right, go and inspire some other girl, and see if she throws a javelin 50m.”

This sort of banter continued. After Zátopek won the 10,000m, he was asked what could possibly motivate him to try for the marathon too: “At present, the gold medal score in the Zátopek family is only 2-1. This result is too close. To restore some prestige I must try to improve on it, and win the marathon” – which of course he did.

The Zátopeks weren’t just the most successful of Olympic couples, but perhaps closest: at home, when Ingrova needed to

do a wash, she’d fill the bathtub with soapy hot water, throw in

the dirty clothes, then have her husband run over them, on the spot, for two hours. The clothes came out spotless – and Zatopek got in his second training session of the day. To further improve his stamina, he had also taken to running in the mountains with Ingrova on his shoulders.

They weren’t the first great sporting couple to share Olympic success, although it was much later before the Olympics became a more open market for couples to get together. For Maeve Kyle, the first Irish women to compete in the Olympics, one of the things that surprised her most on arrival to Melbourne in 1956 was how the men and women were housed in separate villages, some distance apart, with a strict 8pm curfew.

By then Kyle was married anyway. She had had more interest in hockey than athletics, until at a hockey tournament in Belfast, she agreed to a blind date with Seán Kyle, an athletics coach – and the rest is Irish Olympic history. He remained her coach for much of her career, with Maeve Kyle also competing in the 1960 and 1964 Olympics – they’re still a happily married couple living in Ballymena, Co Antrim.

But it wasn’t until Sydney in 2000 that an Irish Olympic team included two competitors who were a married couple – high jumper Brendan Reilly, and his 200m-runner wife Sarah – albeit both had English backgrounds.

Brendan Reilly was born in Yorkshire, although with his father a Mayo native and his mother from Laois, there were strong Irish connections, and after representing Great Britain for most his early career (including the 1992 Olympics) he declared for Ireland in 1999. Likewise, his wife was born in Leeds, and first competed for Great Britain, but when it came to Sydney they both marched behind the Irish flag and so created their own little piece of Irish Olympic history.

Now London welcomes the first Irish-born husband and wife team – Rob and Marian Heffernan – who will take to the Olympic stage in perhaps two of the most contrasting events of all: the long, slow and laboriously exhausting race walk, and the fast, explosive and nervously exciting 4x400m relay.

Men’s race walking and the women’s relay mightn’t share much, yet the Heffernans certainly do – their rented house in Douglas in Cork not far from where they were both born and raised, and the athletic club in Togher that first brought them together.

At 33 Rob Heffernan is four years older, and London represents his fourth Olympics, while his wife is poised to make her Olympic debut: Rob was also a member of Togher AC first, with Marian joining when she was about 16 after her juvenile club, Mahon AC, broke up – and, although those teenage years sparked their relationship, it was several years later before they became a couple.

By then Marian had essentially given up on her once promising sprint career. In early 2007 she joined her husband at one of his high-altitude training camps: “She saw the training I was doing, and always said I was mad,” explained Rob. “Then I think she realised it wasn’t that abnormal after all, and felt if she could give her event the same commitment then there was no reason she couldn’t make some big breakthrough as well.”

Later that summer she was back competing, and when hopes that the women’s relay team might make Beijing disintegrated, she merely redoubled her efforts to be the best she could. It hasn’t been easy: they have an eight-year-old son Cathal (and Rob also has a daughter, Meghan), which effectively makes for two parents working full time on their own sport.

“We do try our level best to have some sort of a social life,” Rob explained, “but it’s just not really possible. It might just mean we go out for some sushi, on a Friday, and we’re back home by 9pm.

“And people often ask us what we talk about after a day’s training, and all I say is anything but athletics. We try to switch off each evening as much as possible.”

Marian typically trains first, early in the morning, with Rob doing his long training walk later – with Cathal sometimes following him on the bike. They also had The Late, Late Show audience in giggles earlier this year when describing their sleeping arrangements, as Rob, when not away at altitude training, sleeps inside an altitude tent, designed to mimic the effects of living at 10,000ft.

Given Marian’s event wouldn’t necessarily benefit from so-called altitude training, she would sleep in their son’s room next door – unless she felt the urge to join the “mile-high club”.

Indeed given the differences in their event, they rarely if ever train together: “Maybe a bit of a jog, but only in the off season,” said Rob. His willingness to maximise every possible training aid – including the nutritional ones, such as freshly pressed home-grown wheat grass – isn’t fully shared by Marian, although she has other commitments of her own. Having qualified as a sports injuries therapist in 2010, she is starting up her own practice, in a large wooden shed in their back garden.

This commitment to their Olympic ambitions was tested in a tragically sad way last August, when not long after arriving in Daegu for the World Championships, Rob got a phone call to say his mother had died suddenly, in an accident, at her home in Cork. Marian was also set to compete in the relay, but instead they shared a flight home for the funeral.

A few days later Rob told Marian she had to go back and compete, because otherwise she might lose her place in the relay team. As it turned out their time in Daegu was instrumental in getting them to London – it wasn’t an emotional decision, it was a practical one, a husband and wife in perfect sync with what they each needed to do for themselves and each other.

If pure, unyielding Olympic ambitions, such as the Heffernans’, can bring couples closer together, it can also bring them together in the first place, as it has with Derval O’Rourke and Peter O’Leary.

It’s probably not the first “boy meets girl” story from the closing ceremony of the Olympics, where emotions are no doubt running quite high anyway, but when O’Rourke and O’Leary found themselves walking together inside the Bird’s Nest in Beijing four years ago, they already had quite a bit in common. Both being from Cork – O’Rourke from Douglas and O’Leary from Crosshaven – they got chatting, and two days later they found themselves on the same flight home, in the seats next to each other.

O’Leary has pointed out that those seating arrangements were organised alphabetically. They arranged to meet again and, within a few months, had moved in together, and share a house in south Dublin.

Their events, however, couldn’t be much further apart: O’Rourke the sprint hurdler, who completes her race in 13 seconds (or preferably about half a second faster), and O’Leary the Star class sailor, who takes in 11 20-minute races in eight days in his 22ft keel boat (with his partner of another sort, David Burrows).

On that night in Beijing they shared a subdued mood too, as injury had denied O’Rourke her best shot of impacting in the 100m hurdles, in what was her second Olympics, while O’Leary finished a slightly disappointed 13th in what was his Olympic debut.

At age 31, O’Rourke now qualifies as a veteran of her event, and, at 28, O’Leary is possibly still learning more about his. W hat is certain is that neither claims to know anything at all about their opposite events. It’s understandable, given O’Leary is purely sea-faring and requires major equipment and other transport costs – while all O’Rourke really has to worry about is her race spikes.

So what do these two Olympians talk about when not talking about sailing or sprinting? O’Rourke doesn’t deny these are subjects they’re both happy to steer away from.

“Anytime I’ve done any interviews recently, I’ve been asked, ‘do Peter and I spend the whole time talking about the Olympics?’ I get the impression that people would like to hear that we are sitting there analysing hurdle technique, and discussing the possible weather conditions for Weymouth.

“But nope, the truth is far more boring. He rings me, and tells me what positions they came. Otherwise I don’t have a clue, just as he doesn’t have a clue how to jump a hurdle. I’m not into sailing, and I don’t even swim. But I understand the competitive side of it.”

If anything O’Rourke believes that competing in such radically different Olympic disciplines actually makes their relationship that bit easier – as does the fact that they’re both so focused on London.

“We’re on similar schedules, so it just seems normal in our house that we’re going to the Olympics. If I was going out with somebody else it might be a bigger deal.

“And I think that sailing is unbelievably hard, and I have a lot of respect for their event, but then I don’t really have a clue about it. I just can’t give him any advice. I can’t tell him how to sail his boat, because I really don’t know. But Peter does cross-train, and outside the boat they do train really, really hard. I actually think their sport is misunderstood. The amount of work that goes into it is quite colossal.”

Given O’Rourke’s fiercely competitive nature, what happens during those rare occasions when they might share a session in the gym? “I want to beat him in everything, whereas he couldn’t care less. He is not competitive with me at all. Anytime I try to get competitive with him he tells me I cannot sail a boat, so he doesn’t care.”

Zátopek would no doubt have agreed: sometimes there can only be one real winner in any relationship.