Boyce tips race walker Kenny to win Olympic medal

Brendan Moloney’s professional football career was never dull and brought the Beaufort man a lot of success, writes Damian Stack

IRISH two-time Olympian Brendan Boyce believes that the sky is the limit for fellow race walker David Kenny from Ballyhar.

The 21-year-old Farranfore/Maine Valley athlete, a training partner of Boyce under the tutelage of Rob Heffernan in Cork, has sprung to prominence in 2020 with victories in the National Indoor 5km walk and the National Outdoor 20km walk.

The more experienced Donegal man Boyce, runner-up to the Kerry walker in both events, is confident that Kenny has what it takes to go to the top of his chosen pursuit.

“He has taken to it like a duck to water,” said Boyce to The Kerryman this week.

“He has naturally more speed than me, though I would fancy myself over the longer distances. Anything over 20km anyway. David has proved that he’s got what it takes. The talent is there, and so is the mentality. I can see him being a fixture on the international scene for the next ten years at least. He will be finished college soon, there will be no distractions, the potential for David is endless.”

Before the COVID-19 pandemic brought pretty much all sporting activity in the world to a sudden halt, Kenny was preparing for the now cancelled World Team Walking Championships in Belarus in May and he had also, almost certainly, nailed down his place in Ireland’s Olympic squad for Tokyo.

With the European Championships in Paris in late August looking extremely unlikely to take place, the Ballyhar star’s immediate progression has hit a roadblock, but Boyce is convinced that Kenny is only going to get better and better.

“Next year in Tokyo will be an experience and a bonus for David. He will really be looking to Paris (2024) and Los Angeles (2028) to make his mark. Next July he will also have the Euro Under-23s in Bergen in Norway and he should be relishing those type of events, competing with fellas of his own age, and trying to win a medal. There are massive carrots ahead of him in the next few years,” stressed Boyce.

Can the Kerry man win an Olympic medal in the future?

“He’s a more natural talent than me. And I think I can win a medal! Once he doesn’t steal my Olympic medal, he’ll be fine!” laughed Boyce.

YOU have to want it, really want it, and even then wanting it isn’t enough. Not nearly enough. Beyond talent, you have to have that iron will. You have to have that conviction. You have to believe. You have to believe in yourself. You have to put everything on the line and that’s even just to get to the point where it might –

might – be possible.

It’s what leads a young lad from Beaufort, plying his trade underage with Killarney Athletic, to decide at age fifteen to make the move to playing his football in Dublin. It was the first of many leaps of faith over the course of a long and varied career.

Early every Saturday morning his parents would drop him off at Killarney Station. Threeand-a-half

hours later he’d arrive in Heuston, where he’d be collected and taken training with Belvedere Football Club, a famed nursery on Dublin’s northside.

Brendan Moloney knew that’s where he needed to be if he ever hoped to make it. That’s where he had to be if he ever hoped to be spotted like Mark Kennedy, Wes Hoolahan or any of the other famous alumni of Belvedere FC had been over the years.

The chances of getting scouted in the Kingdom were slim to none. In the Dublin & District Schoolboy League if you had talent – if you made a splash – you’d been seen. Playing knowing that was a hell of a lot of pressure for a young man, still just a kid really.

Moloney, though, seemed to thrive under it. The schoolboy club would tell him when somebody was there to have a look at him. Pressure notched up that little bit more. Eventually they told him that an English side wanted him over for a week’s trial. More pressure, higher stakes.

He travelled alone. An experience his weekends in Dublin prepared him for somewhat. The training and trial games went well. Still, though, when the Nottingham Forest youth coaches sat him down afterwards there had to have been a moment or two’s doubt, of fear even.

When they told him they’d like to see him again in a month or two he knew: they were interested. A weight lifted. His journey towards a professional career, the dream driving everything he did, could begin, but that’s all it was: a beginning.

The hard work was just getting started.

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EVEN though Moloney never had any doubts about signing on the dotted line, even though it’s what he always wanted, the first few months in Nottingham were always likely to prove difficult if not a little daunting.

“I settled in after a while,” he says.

“Obviously the first while was very tough. You’re away from home and your family, so it is tough in the first five or six months, but after a while, as I always say, it just becomes the norm then. You just get used to it.

“The first year I did fairly okay, just getting used to everything. The second year then I started to make quite big strides. I found myself progressing quite quick. I was captain of the Youth team and got Young Player of the Year.

“I really started progressing quite quickly and I signed a new deal half way through that year and just went from there really.”

The then Forest manager Colin Calderwood liked what he saw in the young Kerry man and it wasn’t long before he was making first-team squads.

Indeed Moloney was just 18 when he made his debut for the two-time European champions off the bench, replacing Kris Commons in the dying seconds of a 1-0 home victory against Gillingham in League One on St Patrick’s Day, 2007.

Moloney’s first start came at the start of the following season against Bournemouth.

“I was in a few squads and things like that and your first start is always a big occasion really,” the full-back says.

“I got the opportunity to start, especially for a club like Nottingham Forest as well – a big club. It was a dream come through really to get my first start in the Football League.”

At the end of the year Forest were promoted back to the Championship, but Moloney doesn’t really see it as his promotion, having only featured in a handful of games. Still, though, it brought Forest and Moloney to another level. The Championship then, as now, was an insanely competitive division – “it’s like a mini-Premiership really,”

Moloney explains.

The standards required to make it as a Championship footballer are exacting and in Forest’s first year back in the second tier the boy from Beaufort made twelve appearances. No mean achievement for a 19-year-old.

Despite that brilliant start to his Forest career, there was always a sense that Moloney was chasing his tail a little bit at the City Ground. Not because he wasn’t playing well or putting in the commitment or anything like that, simply because of the number of managerial changes that happened during his six years at the club as a senior player. This was not the Forest of Brian Clough’s heyday, after all, but a club that had struggled since falling out of the top flight.

“That’s the one disappointing thing really, the amount of managers I had,” Moloney says of his six different bosses in six seasons.

“It was madness like. It’s hard for any player when managers are coming and going, whether