Gavan Casey

BETWEEN TWO PINK public benches opposite the parish church, staring head-on into the South Tipperary mountains, stands a monument to The Champion Kiely.

Publicly funded and erected in 1978, its inscription once paid homage to the “World All Round Champion” from the St Louis meet of 1904.

These days it describes him as “Thomas F. Kiely, Olympic champion”.

Ireland’s first ever Olympic gold medallist was born in the village of Ballyneale (these days spelled Ballyneill), three miles outside Carrick-on-Suir, on 25 August 1869.

He was the eldest son of 10 children born to cattle-dealers William and Mary Kiely (née Downey), who farmed 70 acres of leased land in Curraghdobbin, a short walk from their home.

Tom, like his siblings, helped out on the farm from a very young age.

A couple of fields away were the Davins, farmers in their own right but better recognised as Ireland’s leading sporting family. Brothers Maurice, Pat and Tom were all exceptional sportsmen, with Maurice and Pat in particular renowned on either side of the Irish Sea as the best weight-throwing and jumping athletes of the 1870s and 1880s. Maurice was also a founding member of the GAA.

Kiely’s father warned him off it — he regarded the Davins as having their priorities arseways when it came to balancing their athletic pursuits with their farm-work — but Tom was quite literally surrounded by sport. The first ever game of codified Gaelic football took place in nearby Callan, Co. Kilkenny, when he was 15. Ballyneale and its surrounding areas were the vanguard of a sporting revolution. It’s likely that, by this stage, Kiely was already spending his spare time being put through his paces a couple of fields over from the family farm.

Maurice and Pat Davin would make freely available their training equipment to young lads in Ballyneale who harboured similar sporting ambitions to their own. Come summer evenings, when they were finished on the farm, the brothers — who for years had dominated both Irish and English national athletics championships — would coach lads either in athletics or bring them up to speed on the Gaelic games that Maurice was in the process of drawing up.

Kiely would go on to captain the Grangemockler football team and play for his county. In 1896, he was selected for the Munster hurling side that played Leinster in London. He even refereed a game between Tipperary and Kilkenny in New York in 1906, by which stage he was both a seminal figure within the GAA’s cultural movement and probably the greatest sportsman on the planet.

Maurice Davin would have known what he had on his hands years earlier. Kiely, a farm-built youngfella who grew to nearly six-foot-two and something approaching 200 pounds, was steered by a champion athlete whose expertise in diet and physical conditioning was cutting-edge for its time.

In spite of the usual kind of tensions with his father, Tom remained dedicated to the Kielys’ own farm; his duty was to his family first and foremost and he would remain extremely close to his siblings for as long as he lived. He was known locally as an exceptional dancer and an equally dab hand on the fife, but Kiely himself seemed to recognise from a young age that sport would be the arena in which he would truly excel.

In 1888, shortly before he turned 19, Kiely entered his first athletics meet in Clonmel. He competed in every available track-and-field event. There was a taste of more off it.

The following year, Kiely won seven events in Carrick and, in 1890, aged 20/21, he won 33 more across eight meets in South Tipp.

His breakthrough season on a national level came in 1892. Kiely captured his first Irish Athletic Amateur Federation championship in the ‘All Around’, the forebear to what we know as the decathlon. It consisted of a 100-yard sprint, shotput, high-jump, 120-yards hurdles, 880-yards walk, hammer throw, pole vault, 56-pound weight throw, long jump, and the mile. (Unbelievably, until 1912, the All Around was contested in a single day whereas the modern decathlon takes place over two days).

A month later, Kiely entered the GAA Championship at Dublin’s Jones’ Road venue, present-day Croke Park. This was a time at which football and hurling had not yet fully embedded themselves into mainstream Irish consciousness and so this ‘championship’ was ostensibly a separate national athletics meet. Kiely won an unprecedented seven individual titles: the shotput, the 28-pound throw, the 7-pound throw, the long jump, the hammer; the hop, step and jump; and the hurdle race.

In 1895, at Glasgow’s Celtic Park, the first dual meeting between Ireland and Scotland saw his burgeoning reputation begin to transition towards legend.

With the teams tied at five wins apiece and with Scotland’s long jumpers leading in the final event, Irish officials threw a Hail Mary and pleaded with Kiely — who had finished for the day and was getting dressed in his tent — to give it one shot.

With time of the essence, Kiely rushed to the event without even lacing his shoes. He bolted down the runway and took flight, winning both the event and the day for Ireland.

Kiely would go on to routinely serve as captain of the national team, who beat Scotland in eight of the countries’ first 10 internationals.

Kiely would continue to dominate closer to home, too, but he did not compete at the first two modern-day Olympic Games in Athens in 1896 or Paris in 1900.

A combination of factors can explain Kiely’s absence from those Summer Games: for starters, very few of the world’s leading athletes cared about the Athens Olympics which were low-profile, expensive, and may not have even crossed his radar to begin with. Secondly, Kiely had a family farm to run; a months-long trip to compete in amateur sport would have been unfeasible. Thirdly, and perhaps most pertinently, Ireland did not compete at the Olympics as a free state until the 1924; Kiely, a committed nationalist, wouldn’t have even entertained the idea of competing under a British flag.

The latter point goes some way towards explaining why Kiely felt comfortable competing for what is now recorded as his Olympic gold medal from the 1904 Games in St Louis: he didn’t consider that championship to be the Olympics at all, and seemingly neither did its organisers.

The-track-and-field portion of the 1904 Summer Games, which itself was subsumed into the even larger Louisiana Purchase Exposition (St Louis World’s Fair), was to be held in late August and early September. America’s Amateur Athletic Union (AAU), meanwhile, which governed all sports at the Fair, decided to stage Kiely’s event, the All Around, on its customary date of American Independence Day — eight weeks before the Olympics’ athletics events.

Sports historian Dr Frank Zarnowski, who specialises in the decathlon, notes in a Journal of Olympic History profile of Kiely that the secretary general of the AAU labelled the 1904 All Around event as the “World’s Championship”, which wasn’t a million miles from the truth and seems to have been accepted verbatim.

At no point during his correspondence home from St Louis did Kiely refer to the Olympics, nor did any of the three St Louis daily newspapers that reported upon his All Around event.

But Kiely himself, then 34, was nonetheless big news across the Atlantic: he was the holder of 36 Irish track-and-field titles and something approaching 30 world-record marks, most of which were verified at the time but don’t feature in World Athletics’ official logs — primarily due to changes and inconsistencies with equipment around the turn of the 20th century.

It’s worth noting, too, that while Kiely’s abilities were clearly extraordinary, this was an era in which Irish-born athletes held the majority of throwing and jumping world records. Indeed, Ireland had a virtual stranglehold on the hammer throw for half a century: between 1885 and 1938, every world record for the 16-pound hammer was held by an Irish-born athlete, be they competing at home or in America. In his wonderfully researched book, Tom Kiely: Erin’s Champion (2020), author Kevin McCarthy — the country’s leading authority on Kiely outside of his living descendants — notes that only one of the eight Olympic hammer titles on offer between 1900 and 1932 were won by an athlete from outside of Munster’s Golden Vale of Tipperary, Cork and Limerick.

This was the golden age for Irish athletics and Tom Kiely was its poster boy. He sailed for America at the end of May on board the steamship RMS Teutonic, built in Belfast by Harland and Wolff.

Dr Tom Hunt of the GAA’s History Committee recently wrote on GAA.ie that the Teutonic’s manifest records Kiely’s passage as being paid by a “friend”. Hunt proposes that the friend in question was most likely William Prendergast, a Clonmel man and a former secretary of the GAA who had emigrated to New York in 1892, joined the police force, and later found success in real estate. Kiely is understood to have stayed with Prendergast during his pre-championship training camp.

It’s likely, too, that Kiely at least partly funded his trip to Missouri, with author Bob Withers (Tom Kiely: For Tipperary and Ireland, 1997) among those to write that the Ballyneale man sold many of the prizes he had garnered throughout his illustrious career before he set off for America. (‘Prizes’ at the time would not have been trinkets but practical, sometimes valuable items such as suits, clocks, and silverware).

What’s dead certain is that Kiely’s arrival off the boat at the start of June made quite the splash in the American press. One headline of several, published in The World newspaper, read: ‘Tom Kiely, Esq. comes all the way from Ireland to trim best athletes in America.’

Though he had developed a lofty cultural standing back home, tales of Kiely turning down lucrative offers from Britain to wear their colours in the St Louis ‘Worlds’ might be apocryphal; Britain didn’t send a single athlete to compete in the All Around event and, in any case, it wasn’t a national-team competition to the same extent as the Olympic Games that followed later that same summer.

Indeed, the July 1904 St Louis competition moonlit as the unofficial American club championship, and Kiely was duly offered financial reward to don the vest of at least three major US athletics clubs: New York AC, the Irish-American AC and the Chicago AAC.

He declined their offers, making it clear both to newspapers and in his official entry documentation that he would represent only “Ireland and Tipperary” in the All Around. Kiely’s grandson and namesake, Thomas F. Kiely of Clonmel, said years later that his grandfather “took a green Fenian flag with the gold harp and planted it wherever he went to compete.”

In preparation for the championship, Kiely called Celtic Park in Long Island, New York, his training base. Upon reaching St Louis, he told the Milwaukee Sentinel: “For the first time in my life, I prepared for a contest by following the American method of training.

“I worked hard in New York for three weeks and then went to St Louis without feeling any traces of the ill-effects of the ocean trip.”

In rain-sodden conditions on 4 July, 1904, Kiely won four of the 10 All Around events — the walk, the hurdles, the hammer and weight-throwing — to seal the greatest victory of his career to date. He finished 120 points clear of two-time American champion Adam Gunn in second, with the hammer thrower and four-time All-American guard of the University of Pennsylvania football team, Truxtun Hare, in third.

In fourth place was John Holloway of Bansha, Co. Tipperary, who had emigrated some years previously.

Kiely never considered himself an Olympic champion, a status which in 1904 carried no gravitas in any case. In a postcard home to his family after his victory, the ever-humble Kiely began simply: “Well, I won the world championship”.

Kiely was celebrated across the East Coast of America for the guts of three months, being paraded through galas hosted by Irish emigrants and Irish-Americans in cities like New York, Buffalo and Boston. Those with Irish blood bowed before Erin’s Champion.

He finally returned to the motherland on 7 October at Queenstown (now Cobh), Co. Cork, aboard the Celtic.

Even before Kiely could touch grass back on the other side of the pond, he was greeted by a party that included Maurice Davin as well as GAA president James Nowlan and honorary secretary Luke O’Toole, all of whom boarded a tender and intercepted the Celtic as it approached the harbour.

Kiely was mobbed by the public before the group made their way to the Kilmurray Hotel, where GAA officers presented the champion with an illuminated address designed by Dublin artist, Thomas Fitzpatrick. It welcomed Kiely home as the living embodiment of “our Gaelic manhood, as the greatest modern exponent of Irish physical culture and as the chief ornament of the Gaelic arena today”.

The story has been told since that a large crowd gathered at the railway Station in Carrick-on-Suir to receive Kiely off the train from Cork. However, in anticipation of the fuss, Kiely hopped off a stop before Carrick and walked the rest of his way home.

In 1954, three years after Kiely’s death, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) was convinced by Hungarian sports historian Dr Ferenc Mező of Hungary, among others, to recognise the 1904 All Around as part of its official record of the 1904 Olympics in St Louis. The IOC now lists Kiely as a gold medallist of the Great Britain and Ireland team at the 1904 Summer Games.

This decision, while disputed by the likes of Dr Frank Zarnowski, also proffers a slice of Irish sporting history to Bansha’s fourth-placed finisher John Holloway: he is the first man to have ever worn the shamrock emblem in an Olympic arena.

Zarnowski went on to write in his Heroes of a Forgotten Sport (2005) book that “Tom Kiely, without ever competing at the Olympic Games, became an ‘Olympic’ champion. Likely no athlete ever more deserved to be an Olympic champion. But the belated honour made no difference to his reputation. He was, in his day, the world’s best athlete. Everyone knew it. Period.”

By career’s end in his late 30s, Kiely had won somewhere in the region of 3,000 prizes. He had won a definitive 53 national titles.

He also won a second American/World All Around title in Boston in 1906. Remarkably given he was 36, Kiely won it by an even bigger margin than he had in St Louis, and on a far dryer track.

In a letter home to his family, he explained that he was forced to win the hurdle leg in his socks because a Bostonian official — given only the surname ‘Clarke’ — refused to give him a minute to change into different shoes.

Kiely soon afterwards married his wife, Mary, back home. They had three sons and five daughters. Kiely made use of his profile as well as significant business acumen, going on to either own or live on eight different farms across three counties, most of them situated near Ballyneale. He mentored young athletes until his later years.

In an editor’s letter published by the Waterford News over a century ago, CP Redmond summed up The Champion Kiely: “Wherever throughout the wide world an Irish athlete has found a home, or where there exist admirers of magnificent athleticism, the name of Thomas F. Kiely is familiar and esteemed.

“…The Premier County has given to the world one of the finest all-round athletes of recent times, in addition to a characteristic specimen of an Irishman of the best type – upright and amiable, generous and trustworthy and a sportsman from sole to crown.”