Heed Cork Olympian Dr Pat’s words, go for a gold hat-trick, Dr Paul O'Donovan

There is an audio from 1966 you can hear online, in which the then short-in-the-tooth Jimmy Magee is interviewing the great Cork Olympian Pat O’Callaghan.

The hammer thrower, who won gold medals at successive Games in 1928 and 1932, is asked his biggest disappointment in sport.

Dr Pat doesn’t hesitate.

“Standing in the stadium in Berlin in 1936 when I really was ahead of everybody and at my best, and to be standing there and see your title going by default because we couldn’t compete...” he replies.

The Kanturk athlete always rued never getting the chance to win a third gold medal on the run, because Ireland had boycotted the Berlin Games in a row over it being unable to send athletes from the North.

Dr Pat attended the Games anyway as a spectator, and remarkably, in a story told by his grandson, he was watching events in the Berlin Stadium when he was told Adolf Hitler had requested the company of this legend of the hammer event.

The Corkman walked into the bowels of the stadium, and would have faced the queasy prospect of having to shake the hands of the Fuhrer and his henchmen Goebbels and Goering in front of a crowd of photographers, had he not had the fortune to stand in line beside the brilliant black athlete Jesse Owens.

Goebbels is said to have steered Hitler away from an embarrassing encounter with the distinctly non-Aryan Owens, thus also saving Dr Pat from a meeting with the century’s most evil man.

Thirty years later, it still rankled with Dr Pat that he had missed out on the chance of another gold in 1936. Indeed, the winning hammer throw in Berlin was 56.49 metres, and he threw an unofficial world record of 59.54 metres in Fermoy a year later.

When you hear the regret in his voice, you can only hope - selfish as it may be - that Dr Pat’s modern-day successor, and fellow doctor, Paul O’Donovan, won’t turn down a similar chance to cement his Olympic legacy and will go for a third successive gold medal at rowing.

Having equaled Dr Pat’s achievement in securing back-to-back gold medals in Paris, he and his brilliant team-mate Fintan McCarthy now have a decision to make.

Their event, the lightweight double sculls, has been dropped from the next Games in Los Angeles in 2028, but there is an ‘out’ - the pair can enter the heavyweight section instead.

There is hope in some quarters that they will choose this route, and O’Donovan told RTÉ after his latest gold: “It’s definitely something that’s on my mind at the moment so I must go home and write out a plan for the next four years and see how to fit that one in.”

Four years is a long time in sport, and he and Fintan are taking time out to weigh up their choices.

O’Donovan has just turned 30, and will surely be young enough to aim for another gold in LA. He loves the sport too, but can he retain the appetite to continue the gruelling training regime necessary for rowers at his elite level? And what about his career as a doctor?

As I said, it is selfish of couch potatoes like me to insist he go on sacrificing so much for our once-every-four-years entertainment - so I can only hope that some emotional blackmail reverberating down the decades from the late, great Dr Pat O’Callaghan will do the trick!

Modest O’Donovan doesn’t seem the type to be swayed by glory, but it’s worth adding that the group of people who have won three successive Olympic golds at endurance events is small - the crème de la crème, as they might say in Paris.

Needless to say, he would be the greatest Irish Olympian ever, and share a pantheon with the likes of swimmer Michael Phelps, sprinter Usain Bolt, and a certain hammer thrower called John J. Flanagan.

Born in Kilbreedy, Co. Limerick, Flanagan emigrated to New York and became a cop. He won golds for the USA at three successive Olympics from 1900 to 1908, going on after he retired to coach our own Dr Pat.

O’Donovan famously said he was a fan of “shteak and spuds” after his first Olympics in 2016, and he could certainly enjoy tearing into that diet if he stepped up to the heavyweight division in rowing.

And I solemnly promise that if he does get that historic gold medal in Los Angeles in 2028, I won’t be putting him under any pressure to go for number four in Brisbane in 2032... well, maybe a little cajoling!

But I may well insist that Skibbereen erect a statue to their great Olympian, similar to the one erected for Dr Pat in Banteer. I imagine the good doctor would be mortified!

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Dr Pat O’Callaghan and Paul O’Donovan share quite a few things in common. As well as being doctors - the former was the youngest ever to qualify as such in Ireland - and Olympic legends who are from Cork, they both came from prodigious sporting families - Paul won his first Olympic medal with his brother Gary, you might recall.

Dr Pat and Dr Paul also share a dry Rebel sense of humour.

O’Donovan insisted throughout the Paris Olympics that he and Fintan had been written off and were under-dogs, even though nobody had done anything of the sort. After the gold medal row, he claimed it was all a “fluke”.

O’Donovan could easily claim gold in the very Cork sport of ball-hopping.

Dr Pat wasn’t averse to a little ball-hopping too, and there is a lovely story that illustrates the wit of the great man, who died in 1991.

Having flown to the Los Angeles Olympics in 1932, he was heading through emigration at the airport with his bag, in which he had packed his hammers beside bottles of poitín. This being the time of Prohibition, remember.

Alas, the clink-clink of the bottles on the hammers betrayed his illegal booty, and an Irish American customs official stopped Dr Pat.

“What’s in the bag?” the official demanded.

“Medicine,” the good doctor replied without missing a beat. “I’m the team doctor.”

“Safe travels, so,” said the customs man.