Heffernan walks the walk but Kerry Jerry really talks the talk

TV VIEW:IT'S THAT time of year when we get to watch what's good for us, that annual dose of athletics, which like a short Lenten stretch of surviving on porridge and fish, is supposed to uplift our sporting souls.

This time it has been the European Championships from Barcelona but every summer has its athletics bit where the television stations dutifully throw their resources at events that in the other 51 weeks of the year subsist on a diet of indifference.

It’s akin to what the BBC do with opera, a token bit of reminding the great unwashed what they should be watching rather than what they actually are.

All that running and jumping has an aesthetic vibe that nourishes the souls of those who decide what is put up on our screens. It’s all those classical references to Greeks hoiking javelins at Persians and Spartans doing themselves injuries by knocking up a sweat; looks great and it fills out that public service brief. It’s all so very wholesome in a dry brown bread kind of way.

Athletics, you see, is sport at its most fundamental. It has a purity more common pursuits corrupted by high-finance or gambling, or pitch-invading yokels supposedly don’t have: which is ridiculous really considering some of the shenanigans that have discredited athletics over decades.

This purity contains a 100-metre world record which had previously decreased in tiny increments down the years but was smashed to smithereens at the last Olympics by a man all but pulling up at halfway who spent the last 30 metres showboating like a Vegas pole-dancer.

But in its worthy way, RTÉ does its duty and tells Peter Collins to forget about cars and try to generate enthusiasm for hours of reading flat, unleavened lines such as “victory for Fedova in the women’s 400 metres, a Russian clean-sweep there”.

You couldn’t move for “ovas” of various shapes and sizes last week. Until Derval O’Rourke’s silver, Collins had little to work with apart from revealing which heat the Irish athletes had exited the championships from. And it is when staring down both barrels of televisual boredom you find out who the real deals are.

So it was almost possible to hear the whimpering gratitude of the RTÉ bosses whenever Jerry Kiernan appeared on screen.

Plenty ex-performers have taken to television with various degrees of success. Kiernan might just be the best of the lot. In a week when the words triumph and tragedy were lobbed about with abandon, the only genuinely salty tears were at the realisation it will be another year before Jerry gets on the telly again.

Commendably possessed of the same mullet thatch, albeit a little greyer, he carried to ninth in the 1984 Olympic marathon, Kiernan possesses a passion for and knowledge of athletics that is shared by his panel colleagues, Sonia O’Sullivan and Eamon Coghlan. But what he also has is the priceless ability to communicate that to even the most sceptical among us. As a rule, it is wise to be wary of smooth-talking Kerrymen. Kiernan is the best kind: to the point, honest but with a flair for language as impressive as it is unconscious.

Rob Heffernan’s fourth in the 20km walk was followed by a fourth in the 50km walk. That was 50 times around the a block for four hours in a manner of walking that suggests a desperate need to keep one in. As tabloid editors are wont to say – “where’s the sex?”

Both O’Sullivan and Coghlan, whose devotion to getting his “ths” right is thhhouroughly irritating, tried to jizz things up. But it was Jerry who nailed it.

“I thought Rob Heffernan was all over the place in the 20k. Distance racing is about economy of effort rather than throwing shapes. The 50k put manners on him,” he said. “Rob puts in 220kms a week training. And we’re not talking about going to the shop for a bottle of milk – 10k runners in the Phoenix Park, on their best day, can’t run as fast as Rob can walk.”

As for David Gillick getting stuffed in the 400 metres final, and not turning out the next day for the relay heats, Jerry’s face betrayed a long distance runner’s scorn for a sprinter – “He had 48 hours between races, and it’s only 400 metres. I can only assume in that 48 hours he started to reflect.” – That’s the Kerry way of saying Gillick bottled it a bit. It was said gently and with an understanding of what top-class competition is all about. But it got the point across.

Those who decide what to put on our screens are usually devout golfers. There’s no other way to explain how such a terrifyingly boring visual experience is plastered all over our screens. Even Killarney on a dry week couldn’t make the Irish Open any kind of spectacle other than for those whose idea of excitement is John Daly’s trousers. A sure sign of television boredom is a sudden increase in the amount of talk. At times, John McHenry was starting to sound like Dave Fanning. And that’s good for nobody.