Remembering Ray
Sligo mourns remarkable athletics icon from Calry
AN athlete, a coach, a mentor, an often-outspoken commentator, a loving husband and father, Ray Flynn, who died unexpectedly earlier this week, made a magnificent life-time contribution to athletics at local, national and international level. The Calry native, pictured, began race walking at Calry AC in the late 1960s. He was chairman of High Performance with Athletics Ireland and Ray attended five Olympic Games including the most recent finals in Tokyo.
Close friend Terry Hayes said Ray made contributions at all levels, but his most important work was done locally, training young athletes, identifying and nurturing those with potential and guiding them along the road.
Ray won the National 10,000m walk title in 1982, the 20km walk title in 1979 and the 50km Walk titles in 1976, 1979, 1980 and the 35km in 1990. He was capped six times for Ireland at senior level.
Another close friend, Pierce Callaghan, said Ray’s passing would leave a major void in Sligo, Connacht, and Irish athletics. He was also a close friend and mentor to World champion and Olympic medallist Robert Heffernan. On Twitter, Heffernan, a 2012 Olympic bronze medallist and a 2013 World Championship gold medallist, paid tribute to Ray, his mentor for so many years. He said: “I have lost my best friend Ray Flynn. He was like a dad, a brother, a friend all rolled into one and he was involved with all my successes and failures in my life and was always there for me.”
Ray wrote a ‘must-read’ column for the Sligo Weekender, he was never shy about offering his opinion. His funeral Mass takes place tomorrow, Friday, at Saint Patrick’s Church, Calry, arriving for Mass of the Resurrection at 11am.
THE passing of Raymond (Ray) Flynn, Ballure, Clogherevagh, Sligo, is being mourned locally, nationally, and internationally by family, friends, and the broader athletics community. “Athlete, coach, official, committee member, organiser, volunteer, journalist, judge, mentor, friend, he wore every hat in the sport with great pride,’’ Athletics Ireland said, adding that his passing had left “a major void in Sligo, Connacht and Irish Athletics”,
Ray, born in Ballure, Calry, born in 1953, was a dedicated coach from local to international level.
He was a member of the Athletics Ireland High Performance Committee as well as a dedicated coach and official who was ever present at events across the country.
Ray, in a 2020 interview, talked about the impact athletics had on his life: “Athletics has been great for me, it helped me to see the world. It has given me everything and athletics is generally very positive, and athletics people are very positive as I am, despite my views on other matters.
“It has given me a wonderful life and I would not have got that in any other sport, and I have seen the world. “I would never have seen it only for sport, and I have friends all over the world. And for that, I will be forever grateful.”
From a farming family background, Ray was the epitome of a teak tough ‘country lad’ and took great pride in that.
In 2020 he told the Sligo Weekender: “I grew up in a working-class family in Calry and that background can prepare you pretty well for competition in later life. Jerry Kiernan, the great cross-country and road runner, always said to give him a lad to train from rural Kerry or Sligo or wherever, rather than a lad from south Dublin as they don’t have the same toughness, and Jerry was a teacher in south Dublin for years. They don’t have the teak toughness of the country lad. I found that too.”
An often-outspoken commentator on athletics and sport in general, Ray wrote an always lively and widely-read column ‘Running Shoes’, for the Sligo Weekender from 2002. His thoughts on the GAA regularly caused controversy and lively debate over the years. In 2020 he summed up some of his feelings in relation to the GAA: “People say I am anti-GAA, but I am not and Gaelic games are great to watch, even though I have never been at a GAA match in my life. I think the game is favoured too much by the media in Ireland. I don’t think that individual sports like athletics get a fair crack of the whip. I think the GAA gets too much coverage and of course they are in every parish.
“Another thing is that they think they are better Irish men or women than the rest of us.
“You see an obituary notice on a GAA person who has passed away and you often see the phrase, he or she was a great Gael. What does Gael mean?
Nobody is able to tell me that. If an athletics person dies, are they any less of a Gael?”
Close friend Terry Hayes described him as passionate about what he wrote and said and suggested that Ray took great pride in offering his opinion: “He would let you know exactly how he saw something,what he thought”. Passionate about race walking, he started with his local Calry AC in the late 1960s, inspired by the likes of race walkers such as Jackie McGowan and Tommy Casey, which would in turn lead him to become a European race walking judge.
He ran 42 marathons, his personal best time for the Dublin City Marathon was an impressive 2 hours 38 minutes. He became what is known as a ‘Centurion’, when, at just 20 years of age, he walked 100 miles inside 24 hours. Living in England at that time, he became ‘Centurion 512’ when he completed this feat in 21 hours, 40 minutes, and 13 seconds.
Just 18 when he achieved this remarkable feat, he was at the time the youngest man ever to do so.
In more recent years he was recognised as a top-class coach working with athletes from club, right up to international level, including Robert Heffernan, Olive Loughnane, Colin Griffin, and James Costin.
Typical of his involvement and interest, last Sunday he attended the Irish Life Health National Road Relay Championships hosted by Raheny Shamrock AC.
But you would and did see Ray almost anywhere – he attended six Olympic Games in 2000, 2004, 2008, 2012 and 2016, and, of course, the delayed games, held last year in Japan. A high performance coach in Japan as a muti-faceted co-ordinator for Team Ireland, he was one of the few people allowed to attend the Olympic Games such were the level of Covid-19 restrictions.
He may be best known by some as a trusted mentor of the great Rob Heffernan, who won an Olympic medal in 2012 and Ray was groomsman at his wedding.
Ray was involved with the race walkers, and he went to the Sydney Olympics in 2000 under his own steam. “This was my first Olympics and we had four race walkers there for the first time ever. So, I felt I needed to go, and I was there giving help to them.” Sydney was a great experience for
Ray. That was the year that Sonia O’Sullivan got her silver medal to the nation’s great delight.
“It was probably the best Olympics I was at,” Ray said.
But by 2016 in Rio de Janeiro Ray was the Irish race walking team coach: “From 2000 on we had a great group of race walkers, and a very young Rob Heffernan competed that year in Sydney.
“We hit it off well and we became firm friends and I mentored him over the years, and I was groomsman at his wedding.
“I was in daily touch with him. He won the 50km race at the World Championships in 2013 and I was the coach of the team and that was a great year.”
Recalling the Olympics of 2004, which were held in Athens in Greece, he said it was a very special location: “The old Olympic Stadium has an aura, as does the Olympic Stadium in Berlin – they are two of my favourites.” In 2008 Ray was in Beijing and in 2012 he was in London.
He was also climbing the administrative tree and in 2010 he was head of high performance for all the athletes. Those were, he said, “the four busiest years of my life – my phone never stopped ringing”.
It was busy but “very rewarding”. In London in 2012 he was chair of high performance. Rob Heffernan finished fourth in the 50km, but he was upgraded to bronze because one of the Russians was caught for doping. “There was a big ceremony for him in the City Hall in Cork which I was at. A year later he won gold at the World Championships. I was the team coach along with Rob’s wife at the drinks station.”
Ray attended athletics events at all levels over the years, he was a familiar face everywhere from last year’s
Tokyo Olympics to the side of the track at IT Sligo, now ATU, where he played a role in bi-weekly training sessions for Sligo AC.
Add to that, there was rarely a weekend he wasn’t coaching or supporting athletes at local, national or international level at an event.
But, as the Sligo Weekender wrote in an extensive profile of Ray for the Local Legends series, no matter where he went, he was always the same, “a man who is proud of his small farming background and especially and rightly proud of the great legacy he left his daughter Zola (not surprisingly, named after the great South African athlete Zola Budd) who won the women’s section of the Cork City Marathon in 2018.”
Ray was very grateful that athletics took him all over the world, to Athens, South Africa, Beijing, London, and Rio de Janeiro as he was involved with high performance athletes with Athletics Ireland.
From big names in the sport such as Eamonn Coghlan and Sonia O’Sullivan, he knew athletes at all levels and watching a young athlete excel locally and nationally would have given him as great a thrill as some of the historic achievements he did witness live all over the world with the elite members of the sport.
Ray always maintained athletics had given him so much: “I have been on training camps from Johannesburg to Mexico and I have had a privileged life in the sport, and it has given me so much.”
Ray is survived by his wife Liz, and his children, Rachel, Edel, Zola and Calvin. He is sadly missed by his loving wife and family, brothers Jimmie, John and Paul, son-in-law Fergal, Zola’s partner Domhnall, grandchildren Kayla, Jordan and Laoise, brother-in-law Mickey, sisters-in-law Bernie, Moira, Tina and Joyce, nephews, nieces, relatives, neighbours, the athletics community and many friends.
Reposing at the family home at Ballure (Eircode F91 CK06) from 4pm to 8pm today, Thursday. Home private at all other times please.
Removal tomorrow, Friday, to Saint Patrick’s Church, Calry, arriving for Mass of the Resurrection at 11am. Burial follows in Clogher new cemetery.