GYMNASTICS:Meet a real life hero. It's a story not even the most imaginative script writer could make up, writes JOHNNY WATTERSON
HIS “NAN” Lilly Behan from Santry is putting him up this week. Her Olympic-qualified grandson, whose tucks, pikes and handsprings bounced him into London 2012 arrived to the Shelbourne Hotel. A “cheeky Charlie”, Surrey accent and impish effervescence, Kieran Behan, 5ft 3in, walks into the room and smiles. Everyone smiles.
A 22-year-old with a story too maudlin to dream up, Behan is the first of the Irish hopefuls to have captured the Olympic zeitgeist. He is already the poster boy for team well-being and faith, a reminder that the IOC’s motto of “Faster, Higher, Stronger” maybe lacks ambition.
Have you ever seen a sports psychologist? he is asked.
“No,” he says. “The only thing is I saw a psychiatrist once when I was in hospital and he said you’ve got to come to terms with you’re never going to walk again and you need to be realistic in that side of things.”
Twice asked to digest catastrophe, the first time was after doctors removed a tumour from his leg at 10 years old. The tourniquet, applied too tightly, disconnected the wiring and blood flow. After 15 months he stepped from his wheelchair and climbed back on the bars.
A decent footballer in the Crystal Palace Academy, football fell away and a love affair with gymnastics took over. Two years later, swirling in the air, his head whipped against the bar and they carried him from the gym.
“I remember we had to lift him off the pitted landing area and take him to the hospital,” says his fantastically-named coach Demetrios Bradshaw.
“For a very long time he couldn’t look at bright lights and moving images. He was that bad. It was the scariest. Every time you see a gymnast get a dismount slightly wrong it brings you back to those memories. Even to talk about . . . it’s hard to talk about.”
Another wheelchair. Another dire prognosis. His parents Bernie and Phil watched their son stumble and lurch in crooked lines like a drunk.
Sudden movements and he blacked out. He was brain damaged. Broken hearted, they took no pictures. There are no photographs.
He stands now charming the room like it was all a jolly old lark, possessing everything but fuss or self pity. His rattling chatter of another life, breathless and optimistic plays out surreally from hospital bed to financial hardship.
Helping out his father Phil in the building business; travelling from his home in Croydon, South London, to the Tolworth Club on the other side of town, two hours each way. Walk. Bus. Train.
Bus. Walk. He vaulted ticket barriers, dodged fares. For funding it was cake sales. Raffles. Car washing. On the reception desk of the Tolworth gym is a “Help Kieran” collection jar.
The €20,000 cheque from the Olympic Council of Ireland he is in Dublin to collect springs him into another world. It is the perfect landing.
“To top it off with the Olympics is the impossible dream,” he says. “I remember watching the Olympics on TV with my mum and dad when I was a kid and saying I wanted to go to that.
“Hopefully, I can save up now and get somewhere close to training, get set up so I can walk to the gym, even when I’m knackered.”
Behan has come crashing unexpectedly over Irish sport bearing a feel-good vibe like no other. He threatens to carry us with him. Buoyant and freshly minted in a sport we do not know, he draws helplessly extravagant words from everyone.
“Zen mentality,” says enraptured OCI president Pat Hickey.
“For us to be in that same environment as Kieran . . . I’ve personally never seen that determination . . . along that hard road,” adds his coach. “It’s very difficult to put into words.”
No need. Not any more.
