“He couldn’t walk in a straight line. ‘Come on Kieran, you can do it!’ we shouted and the kids in the ward all cheered. But it was horrendous to look at, like he was inebriated. It broke our hearts. But we couldn’t let Kieran see that. So we’d keep telling him he’d be fine. Then I’d be straight out the room, bawling my eyes out.”
Could that helpless boy really be the supreme athlete who last week qualified for the Games at the London test event and who is now daring to dream of winning a medal in the floor discipline? “It really is like a fairy tale,” smiles the new toast of The Late, Late Show. “The night I qualified, I couldn’t sleep because I was so worried that when I woke up, it wouldn’t all be true.”
It is true but Behan’s story, made in Surrey but a treasure for Ireland, takes some believing. Dublin-born Phil had set up his builder’s business in Croydon and though his lad was a decent footballer at the Crystal Palace academy, this hyperactive eight year-old was only hopelessly besotted by gymnastics.
At 10, a tumour was discovered in his left thigh. The relief that it was not cancerous gave way to horror when the operation to remove it was botched. When he woke from the anaesthetic, he had to cling on to the back of the bed to stop the screaming, so dreadful was the pain from the catastrophic nerve damage. Even today, he has only limited feeling in one foot.
He was wheelchair-bound for 15 months. “The doctors said ‘you’ll never walk again’ and I had to see a psychiatrist who said you have to accept the worst. But that just drove me on; I wanted to prove them wrong. They were saying it was over but I wasn’t having it.”
Bernie gave up work to look after him and, after confounding the physios with his incredible progress, Behan returned to the gym. Within a few months, though, he had slipped from the high bar and smashed his head, suffering severe damage to the vestibular area of the brain that controls balance.
“Then the slightest untoward movement could make him black out,” recalls Bernie. “Literally, he could blink and pass out. It happened thousands of times, terrifying anyone who saw it.”
For the second time in his childhood, Behan was back in a wheelchair, this time not just having to learn how to walk again but how to eat and make the simplest movements. Again, the medics said ‘it’s over’; again, he went back to the gym. Only this time, just to spend hour upon hour trying to retrain his brain, to regain hand-eye coordination like throwing a ball against a wall and catching the rebound. Some days, he could not even manage that.
He missed a year of school and when he returned with a walking stick, the kids taunted him mercilessly. “A terrible time,” Behan recalls. “Days when I was all over the place.” But though it took him a good three years to again become the athlete he had been before the accident, day by slow, painful day this workaholic perfectionist got there.
Further calamities intervened. A broken arm, a fractured wrist, a torn cruciate ligament in his right knee; at one point, he was spending so much time tumbling in and out of A&E, the hospital dispatched a welfare officer to check he was not being abused. Finally, overjoyed at qualifying to make his debut in the European Championships two years ago, the ultimate cruelty befell him when the ACL in his other knee snapped during a training routine.
His coaches, Simon Gale and Demetrios ‘Jimmy’ Bradshaw, point to the gym’s office where they saw their irrepressible mate at his lowest. “I wouldn’t say suicidal but ...” Gale shrugs, his voice tailing off.
“It was the nearest I ever came to quitting,” Behan admits. “Sheer despair really but I’d been through a lot worse and knew that, whatever happened, I could always come back.”
And he has done. Better than ever, as the Challenge World Cup floor champion and now Ireland’s first Olympic gymnast for 16 years, an achievement made even more fanciful in the teeth of practically no financial backing from the country’s sports bodies.
His parents have gone without a holiday for 10 years to help fund the £12,000 a year needed and Behan has had to labour on his dad’s building site or clean the Tolworth gym in the morning before bouncing around it in the afternoon.
On the reception desk stands a “Support Kieran” collection jar, with the club’s members so far having raised more than £2,000. Car washes, cake sales, bacon buttie mornings; you name it, he and his mates have organised it.
“I’m proud to be Irish,” he says but this is an uplifting story of grass-roots British support for the underdog too.
He apologises sheepishly for the odd desperate day when he felt compelled to use his vaulting skills to fare-dodge, bounding over train ticket barriers because he had no money to get to his competition venue. “Oh, don’t tell Boris Johnson,” Mum pleads.
Still, not to worry any more. This week, Ireland’s Olympic chiefs at last allocated €20,000 to help his preparations. “Life-changing money,” sighs Kieran, last seen carrying a vast jar of spare coppers to a bank in the hope there might be enough in there to cover the air fare to an overseas competition.
“That’s Kieran,” Bernie smiles. “Through all this, he’s been the one who’s had the determination, belief and heart. We’ve all just been swept along on his wave. He’s guided us all the way. We believed every day because he believed, because he told us everything would be all right.”
A proud mum’s hero maybe but Kieran is also a universal sporting hero, the personification of the Olympic spirit.
