I WAS NEVER GOING TO BE A NEARLY MAN, I HAD TOO MUCH AMBITION
Bryan Keane ready to make most of second chance after car accident
STORIES will endure when the syringes are empty and broken. That is one of the few true positive points clung to by those who still love the Olympics and believe in its power to make life better, if only fleetingly.
Drugs can make people champions. They can transform sloggers into gold medallists and the proof of that is all around. But it is possible to nurture one’s faith by spending time with honest athletes whose stories tell of plain ambition and hard work. Bryan Keane has one of those stories. He turns 36 this year, and a common desire, the kind that briefly flames inside many children’s heads when sprawled before the Olympics on TV, is about to be fulfilled. Many dream it, very few do it – and fewer again at Keane’s age.
When his story is told, it tends to pivot around the accident. In September 2010, Keane was in excellent form, and competing at the London Olympics was taking viable shape as a target. He was training on his bicycle in Cork when he was hit by a car.
His leg shattered, a knee sustaining catastrophic damage. He was over three months in a brace, and he spent months again learning how to run, let alone compete at the level of an Olympic triathlete.
‘My career was on the up and that was taken away from me,’ he says now. ‘But I got on with the work. I had to do to focus on my new goal, which was to get back running.
‘I just took it day by day. There were little goals along the way. I could never look at a bigger picture, or say “I want to get back and compete at the Olympics”. It was, “This week in the gym I did an exercise and I wasn’t able to do it before”.
‘It took me a year before I was able to touch my foot off my ass,’ he smiles. ‘The knee took the impact; I had two surgeries on it so it took me a year to be able to do that. But when I did it that was a little milestone.
‘They might seem really trivial and tiny things for people, but for me it was a big thing at the time and you just had to take it day by day. You couldn’t make a long-term plan.’
There is no wistfulness when he speaks. What might have been doesn’t seem to interest him at all. Keane is easy company, his voice gentle but with a sing-song Cork signature to it. It is difficult to conceive of him as the ferocious athlete who spends hours every day shuttling between the swimming pool, bicycle saddle and open road.
‘You can’t look back in regret and say what could have been. In sport, you get a lot of, “Sure he could have been a world champion if he kept going”.
‘I don’t want that to be my story. You take responsibility for you. I could have very easily stopped and said I’d had enough and get a job, but that’s not me: I had more ambition and motivation than that, to take control of my destiny and what I wanted to do.
‘I was not someone who was a nearly man, or could have, should have, would have. I did, and I’m doing it.’
His voice doesn’t climb at all when delivering that answer, but they are the words of a hardened elite athlete.
Keane appears a gentle dreamer, but his life is pounded out in laps and miles. He fought to reach a target that could have crumpled beside him on a cold Cork road.
SPLITTING his life at the point of the accident is tempting, but the world does not divide so smoothly. He did not find the desire to become an Olympian in the hours of rehabilitation work he did after getting injured.
It was there for years – even if it took until his late 20s for Keane to find a way of expressing it.
His sporting life began as many do, as a shivering kid on the edge of a swimming pool. That was his first love, expressed in the waters of Dolphin Swimming Club in the Cork suburb of Mayfield.
‘Then I fell into running with Leevale in 1996, then I got side-tracked and got to run for Ireland, and I won a medal as a junior at the European Cross-country championships, and then I ran world cross-country up in Belfast,’ he says, as if each stage was a logical, inevitable progression.
Instead, Keane was a gifted athlete with the ability, determination and endurance to turn his talents in many directions, as he soon proved.
‘It was a fantastic time, but then I fell out of love with running and fell into cycling, and got to ride the Rás in an Irish team.’
He was a capable enough cyclist to make a career as a professional seem possible, but his interest would not settle.
Keane knew there was another sport for him, one that serviced his love of long, fast training sessions.
‘In 1996 I joined Leevale Athletic Club because I wanted to be a triathlete and I knew I needed to run,’ he says. ‘I thought, “I’m in a swimming club, so I’ll just join a running club and then I’ll join a cycling club”. You didn’t really have tri clubs at the time. It wasn’t on the radar.
‘I’d seen it on TV and thought, “Hey, I can swim, I’m a runner, and how hard can cycling be?” It was just something that I saw and I liked the look of it.
‘I just have a love of endurance sports, and a love of going fast for a long time. That was why I joined Leevale, to start triathlon. I didn’t get to race it until 12 years later.’
That was after he moved to Australia. Some of the world’s best triathletes are Australian, but it was not to pursue the sport that Keane moved. He was a graduate of the National College of Art and Design when he emigrated, working as a photographer.
THIS was in 2008, and a general interest in training but also meeting new people led him to join the Bondi Running and Triathlon Club in Sydney. The tireless talent that pinged between swimming, cycling and running had found its outlet.
On his return to Ireland, Keane’s talent continued to quickly unfold. Before the accident, he was figuring high up in races as part of the World Triathlon Series. And when his body healed following the trauma visited upon it, the speed and the great capacity for hard training remained.
A place in Rio was only finally sealed at an event in Tokyo in May, the Yokohama race the final chance to settle his Olympic
I just have a love of endurance sports, going fast for a long time