Not many conversations about hurling suddenly turn to drugs and lifetime bans and whether or not Usain Bolt is actually clean. Not many people are qualified to speak on this either, and whether or not the GAA should be worried at all.
It’s what happens when Gary Ryan sits down to talk about his role as Tipperary hurling fitness trainer. He’s looking fit and also a bit unusually dressed in the official Tipperary team kit, his initials GR embroidered just under his left shoulder, because for years I’ve only known him as Gary Ryan the sprinter.
He declares his hurling credentials add up to “a big fat zero” although strictly that’s untrue: Ryan was born in Kilcommon, a part of Tipperary where every sport other than hurling is considered foreign, and he’s a cousin of Declan Carr, who captained their 1991 All-Ireland hurling winning team.
But his sprinting credentials are big and fat: a two-time Olympian – in Atlanta 1996 and Sydney 2000 – he won 16 Irish sprint titles and broke 30 Irish records, indoors and out, lowering the 100m record six times, to his best of 10.35 seconds. He helped Ireland win the World Indoor bronze medal in the 400m relay in Budapest 2004, and made 31 international representations in all (only three less than Sonia O’Sullivan) before his retirement in 2005. He’s no longer Ireland’s fastest man. But no Irish man ran faster for longer.
No wonder Tipperary manager Eamonn O’Shea describes Ryan as one of his “heroes”
. They already shared a mutual friendship at NUI Galway (where O’Shea lectures in economics, and Ryan headed up elite sports development).
Indeed Ryan has just taken up a position at the University of Limerick aimed at further professionalising their sporting programmes, although for now his thoughts are with Tipperary. He is the man responsible for ensuring the team reach peak physical fitness – again – for the All-Ireland hurling replay against Kilkenny next Saturday evening. Judging by the way Tipperary performed against Kilkenny two weeks ago Ryan got them very close to that peak, although that doesn’t mean he’s not thinking hard about some extra little edge which might get them over the line first.
“I am the worst hurler you are ever likely to meet,” he tells me. “And the players point that out on a regular basis. But if you understand the demands of the game . . . you can develop a training programme around that. But we’re not doing mad stuff. And they’re all mad to learn, mad to try something that might give them some extra little edge.”
Then the subject of drugs suddenly surfaces because in his previous incarnation as an elite sprinter Ryan would often be hounded by the nagging feeling that many of his opponents were benefitting from some extra little edge – in the illegal sense. And that, he says, is one thing he can immediately differentiate between his former life in athletics and his current life in hurling. Not for one second does he think the GAA has any sort of doping problem, or that any player would be even tempted to seek any illegal edge. But then there was a time when athletics was that way too.
If his decade on the international circuit taught Ryan one thing it’s that some athletes, especially those interested only in the prize and not the pride, were perfectly willing and able to cheat. He remembers the 2002 European Championships, in Munich, where he narrowly missed a place in the 200m final. Within a couple of years most of the sprinters who finished ahead of him were banned for doping, including Britain’s Dwain Chambers and the notoriously dirty Konstadinos Kederis from Greece.
Indeed when Ryan sees athletes like Chambers still on the circuit – or the likes of American Justin Gatlin, unbeaten all summer and running faster now than when he was caught twice before on drugs – he can’t help but feel that lifetime bans are the only way to clean up the sport.
“In some cases, if people have corrupted the sport that much, the message has to be they’ve crossed the line, shouldn’t be let back in. Anyone who goes out of their way to cheat has no real place in the sport, as far as I’m concerned. I understand that mistakes happen and people do stupid things and the punishment should fit the crime but I don’t find myself watching Diamond League meetings anymore, no.”
Yet in other ways Ryan loves the sport as much as ever, particularly when helping younger athletes reach their potential, and he still gets a kick too out of sprinters like Usain Bolt
. “Yeah, I’m a huge fan of Bolt. He ran, at 16, what I ran at my peak. You do see enormous talent like that, because there are some freaks out there. And I don’t think doping is as big a problem in athletics now as some people think.”
This is also why the GAA, he says, even if it may never have a doping problem, will always need drug testing. Only that way can Croke Park remain one of the few sporting arenas in the world where nobody walks in or out of with a nagging feeling that any of their opponents were benefitting from some extra little edge in the illegal sense, or were somehow interested only in the prize and not the pride.
