WELL REGARDED
If the reader of this piece is up to it, before going any further, they can try and see if they can beat the World record of Galbally’s Jim Fahey for the Standing Triple Jump. The objective is to see how far they can get from three jumps, all taken from a standing position. It is important to note, however, that this is not a ‘hop, skip and a jump’, but the participant is allowed to use weights, for some competitions, to propel themself forward.
This writer managed about 12 feet without weights: so, how did you do? Because to beat Mr Fahey’s World record, which stands to this day, one would need to exceed the remarkable distance of 40 foot and 3 inches. Achieved at Calumet Grove in Chicago in September 1923, when Mr Fahey himself was about 43 or 44 years of age, this year marks the 100th anniversary of his grand feat, which stands to this day.
There stands in Galbally today a wall-of-fame where the only name, so far, to adorn the sculpture is that of Jim. He was not, however, the only man with elastic in his legs from the region, with the south Tipperary and south Limerick regions birthing a number of high-profile athletes in the early half of the 20th century.
From the parish of Galbally, he spent his youth in Corderry. To obtain an overview of the his life, The Avondhu met with Mooreabbey Milers AC athlete, Tom Blackburn, himself a bronze World Masters mountain running champion, as well as the current chair of Galbally Community Council.
DESIRE TO SEE THE WORLD
Upstairs in the community centre in the village there is a large display of the feats of Jim Fahey and Tom provides the history of ‘The Irish Kangaroo’.
Jim Fahey came from his father’s third marriage and he had a step-sister and at least three full siblings, Elizabeth, Paddy and Tom. According to Mr Blackburn, Paddy was also a ‘fine jumper, and competed at national championships’. Tom would later break his neck when he fell off a load of hay and died at home from his injuries, about a year later.
Tom Blackburn is related to the story of Jim Fahey as his grand-nephew. Mr Blackburn’s grandfather was John ‘Jack’ Blackburn, also a successful athlete. At just five foot and five inches, Jack Blackburn held the Irish record for both the high jump and the pole vault, with the latter achieved with ‘no cushioning, and no going backwards - he did it normally’. Tom says that Jim Fahey had no interest in farming and wanted to see the world, so he sold the farm to Jack Blackburn, who then married Jim’s sister Elizabeth.
“Jim competed against British soldiers who were fit and well-trained. He was always doing distances of 36, 37 feet, but to do over 40 foot was a big achievement. He did no training, and had no special diet; he just turned up on the day and did it’.
Furthermore, if one accepted money from anyone at all back then, an athlete was considered ‘professional’ and could not compete at amateur level. Considering these restraints and the cost of travel, Jim funded many of his achievements through gambling.
Unfortunately, there are no definitive accounts of his records and wins and, writing while Mr Fahey was still alive in November 1933, the writer of an article in ‘An Camán’, remarked that:
“Wherever a chance of competition offered at all, it was mostly at rural meetings in adjoining districts, the accounts of which must be sought in the local press, if they are to be found at all. He competed wherever possible, and invariably with success. His heart was in these familiar tests of cultured vigour; and it is a cause of grief to him now that these old Gaelic contests, toe-to-toe, have fallen into remorseless oblivion at home.”
That said, in the Intercalated Olympic Games in 1906 held in Athens, Greece, Jim won the single broad jump crown, while also gaining champion status with two records from the 1907 Gaelic Athletic Association Championships in the ‘standing hop, step and jump’, as well as in the ‘three standing jumps’ in Thurles.
Moving to Chicago in 1908 aboard the RMS Oceanic, he threw himself into the organisation of Gaelic games in Chicago and continued to compete. While recorded in Dungarvan in 1913 as winning the Munster Three Jumps championship, he was active in the sporting world in Chicago and ‘before long, Yankee sports promoters, ever on the alert for a “star turn”, were only too anxious to secure his appearance at their meets by putting one or more of the standing jumps on their programme’.
It was in his new hometown of Chicago in 1923 that he cleared 40 feet in the now-forgotten sport of ‘three standing jumps’ and he worked on the trams, before passing away in 1958. He and his wife, Mary ‘Mae’ Fahey (nee Delaney) had one son, Fr Thomas Fahey, who passed away in 1993.
“Jim Fahey has brought renown by his athletic pre-eminence to his race and nation; and in the constancy of his devotion to the ideals and aspirations which the best of that race and nation have ever cherished, he represents a factor in the realisation, or perpetuation, of our hopes that cannot, under Providence, be denied success”.