I was at the bottom of the barrel, but sport brought me back
REDMOND IRONED OUT HIS LIFE THROUGH SPORT
AS HE hurled himself into the frigid waters of the Maas river, Ger Redmond felt his old life wash away.
“I remember looking back and I could see a vision of myself on the bridge, like I was swimming away from my old self,” he recalls.
That old self. Where to begin. A promising striker with Coolock side St Columbans and a Kennedy Cup winner in 1995 with the Brenfer NDSL, scouts flocked to watch the teenager from the troubled and long-neglected Dublin suburb of Darndale.
He landed a trial with Scottish side Dunfermline, shared a pitch with Jackie McNamara before he left for Celtic, and dreamed of becoming a professional footballer.
His brush with that world was fleeting.
“My father committed a major crime and I had to come back home,” explains Redmond.
“He got locked up and my mother left home, and left myself and my sister to look after four kids under the age of 10. “My dream was crushed.”
Fast forward to 2017 and Redmond
is standing on a bridge in Maastricht, waiting to jump into the soupy brown current below and start his first ever Ironman.
“I remember standing there thinking, ‘I have my life back’,” he says.
Positivity
“The positivity that I felt that morning was unreal. I thought to myself, this is living.
“No phone, nothing. I used to always have two or three phones on me.
“At that stage I didn’t know if I was going to finish, but the journey and the training and the new lease of life was where I was at.
“I didn’t care if I didn’t finish it. That wasn’t what it was about.
“The training and the change in me was more important than actually finishing the event.”
Redmond completed the gruelling race.
And a year later he finished the Lanzarote Ironman.
In 2019, he raced in more events and in Barcelona he achieved elite status by earning a pro licence.
“The best thing about it was the last 100 metres.
“It’s a red carpet and left and right there are people cheering you on. Real Roy of the Rovers stuff.
“I stopped and I received the Irish flag off my family.
“Only a few years before that, they were visiting me in prison.
“Now they were handing me an Irish flag on my way to becoming a professional athlete.”
Redmond began a prison sentence of sorts as soon as his dad’s incarceration forced the then-teenager home from Scotland.
The real deal came years later. “I basically gave up on life and I joined a criminal gang for protection, because our lives were under threat because of what my father did,” he says.
“I was at the bottom of the barrel for probably the best part of 20 years.
Drug
“I ended up getting sentenced in 2013.
“I got two years for drug offences. I got out, I had four girls at this stage and I had a son in October 2016.
“I decided to change, that I was going to be his hero, not knowing what I was going to do. I just wanted to give up on crime and that life. I was tired of it.
“I just wanted to steer him down the right road, because I never looked up to my own father.”
After serving his time in Mountjoy and St Pat’s, before moving to a training unit at Shelton Abbey, Redmond watched a close pal, Mick Keogh, take part in a triathlon.
He was hooked on the idea of doing one himself.
“I asked him to coach me and I decided to do an Ironman,” he says.
“I started a journey in 2017, I signed up for a full Ironman in Mastricht in August of 2017 and trained towards that.
“But I didn’t have a clue how to swim. I turned up for my first swimming session, no goggles, a pair of bermuda shorts …