Cathal Lombard’s Olympics story sounded too good to be true. In the end, it was

This story is part of a series, The Greatest Irish Olympic Stories Never Told, which will run every Saturday in The Irish Times up to the beginning of the 2024 Olympic Games, on Friday, July 26th

It’s odd sometimes the things that stick in your mind. When I think back 20 years to the one and only time I met Cathal Lombard, what I remember most clearly is good biscuits. At the start of our interview, his mother walked into the living room carrying a serving tray and the biscuits were laid out on a plate, foil-wrapped and artfully presented, along with the good china cups and saucers.

The warmth of the welcome may have stayed with me because it was my first day back at work after my own mother died, and she always did the same thing for visitors. Mrs Lombard seemed so proud of her son. A year earlier, he was barely known outside of Cork. When I met him, he was heading to the Olympics in Athens as the fastest non-African in the world over 10,000m. He knew that people were sceptical about him. But while we sipped tea and ate the good biscuits, he tried to explain how he’d managed to do it. It was one of the most incredible sporting stories I’d ever heard. The only problem was, it turned out, that none of it was true.

At that time – the late spring of 2004 – I’d fallen out of love with my job as a sportswriter for the former Sunday Tribune. Sport is supposed to stretch the limits of our credulity, but the experience of writing about Michelle de Bruin had taught me to doubt everything. Raining on other people’s parades wasn’t something that came naturally to me and the job was turning me into a misanthrope.

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I stepped into Lombard’s house, notebook in hand, like some hard-bitten, career detective. And I asked him straight out whether his sudden emergence as a world-class distance runner had anything to do with drugs. He looked me in the eye and said no – it was down to plyometrics, medicine ball work and a running regime based on lower but better quality mileage. I wrote it all down.

After the interview, as he walked me back to my car, I asked him about his plans for the summer. He said he was going to St Moritz in Switzerland for altitude training, and he might take in a Grand Prix race – possibly Rome. Then he’d find a quiet corner of Italy to prepare himself mentally before flying into Athens a day or two before the 10,000m final. He was going to skip the opening ceremony, which struck me as odd for a first-time Olympian.

“When it’s over,” he explained, “then I can enjoy the experience of being at the Olympics.”

[ Shadows of past Olympic sins return to haunt Ireland on the eve of Rio ]

A cousin was with me that day. He was on work experience with the newspaper, and was surprised by the line of questioning. He asked whether I thought he was telling the truth. I said I didn’t feel like I’d spent an hour with a man who was telling lies. I liked Lombard. He seemed open. He had an answer for every question. There was the proud mother. The Viscount biscuits. But still there were elements of the story he told me that stretched belief to breaking point.

Lombard had been a decent track and cross country runner, and most top Irish athletes had never heard of him before his dramatic breakthrough the previous year. He claimed he was too busy pursuing his law degree and his career as a solicitor to commit himself fully to running. That changed when he watched the 20km walker, Robert Heffernan – a friend of his brother, Fiachra – compete at the Sydney Olympics in 2000 and decided to give athletics his all.

In the autumn of 2001, he spent his life savings on a trip to Kenya to train at high altitude. But when he returned to Ireland a month later, he was no faster on his feet than when he left. He considered chucking it in, but then a friend put in a word for him with Joe Doonan, former coach to Catherina McKiernan. Lombard rented a car and drove to Cavan to see him. Doonan explained that he’d finished with athletics, but he was impressed by the young man’s earnestness, and agreed to coach him.

All that Olympic summer, Lombard was the talk of Irish athletics. People said there was an aloofness about him that made it difficult to make conversation with him

It was six months later, in August of 2003, that people first sat up and took notice of Lombard after he ran a 5,000m race in Heusden, Belgium, in 13:19.22. Mark Carroll, a fellow Corkman, and the fastest Irishman over the distance at the time, remembered being floored when he heard. “I’d [usually] run the 5,000m at the National Championships in around 13:50,” he told me later, “which wouldn’t be world-class by any stretch of the imagination. Cathal would be back in 14:20 or something. I’d never for one minute have considered him a serious challenger.”

Sonia O’Sullivan’s husband, Nic Bideau, was coaching another athlete in the race, the Australian Craig Mottram. “Nic rang me and said some Irish guy ran 13:19,” she recalled. “He said the name. I’d never heard of him. Then I heard Joe was coaching him and I thought it made sense because Joe was a great coach who knew what he was doing.”

[ Lombard retirement yet another bombshell ]

What Doonan didn’t know was that, at some point in his journey towards Athens, Lombard had sat down in front of a computer, typed the letters “EPO” into a search engine, and discovered that the drug du jour among distance athletes seeking an illegal advantage was available to buy via mail order.

The Olympic year dawned. Carroll was at a training camp in Florida when Lombard rang out of the blue, asking if he could train with him. “At that stage, I had huge suspicions about him based on what he ran the year before,” Carroll said later. “But he was on his way down to Puerto Rico for a race, so I said yes. We trained together for 12 days. I couldn’t believe the kind of times he said he was going to run [that year]. Totally unrealistic. I just thought he was dreaming.”

By the end of April, it was Carroll who thought he was dreaming. Lombard had targeted a meet at Stanford University, California, to try to achieve the Olympic qualifying standard for the 10,000m. Sitting with Keith Kelly, the Irish cross country runner from Drogheda, Carroll followed the race on an athletics website that offered live, lap-by-lap updates.

“The leaders were flashing up every minute or so,” he remembered. “It’s Mebrahtom Keflezighi. Then it’s Bob Kennedy. Then it’s Thomas Kipliton. So after 22 laps of a very fast, 25-lap race, it suddenly says that there’s an unknown athlete in third place. I looked at Keith and I said, ‘That’s Cathal,’ and he said, ‘It couldn’t be.’ I said, ‘Wait and see,’ and it was. I was blown away when I saw the finishing time. Baffled would be a better word.”

Lombard finished third. In doing so, he lopped a massive 13 seconds off Carroll’s Irish record of 27:46.82. Carroll had set the time in his only 10,000m race, but he’d been a world-class athlete over 5,000m for five years before he had a crack at it. John Treacy’s previous mark had stood for 19 years. Lombard broke Carroll’s record off the back of 16 months of serious training. “I’m sick,” Carroll remembered texting a teammate. “I have three letters and you know what they are.”

It was two weeks later that I met Lombard in the family home and he insisted that drugs had played no part in his progress. Had he known at that point that Customs officers had already intercepted at least one package addressed to him containing EPO? Had he received a notice that the package had been passed on to the Irish Medicines Board for analysis?

All that Olympic summer, Lombard was the talk of Irish athletics. People said there was an aloofness about him that made it difficult to make conversation with him. At the end of May, O’Sullivan met him for the first time when they competed in the Great Manchester Run. She remembered that he vanished immediately after the race, but then she bumped into him when she stopped at a Starbucks on the way out of Manchester.

“I was standing talking to him,” she told me later, “just asking the usual questions, what training was he doing, where he was racing next. I turned my back to pay for my coffee and when I turned around again, he was gone, no goodbye or anything.”

He may have been looking over his shoulder for the testers. He withdrew from a number of meets that summer, including Gateshead and Crystal Palace. Carroll and O’Sullivan ran into each other at the Irish Track and Field Championships in Santry that July and O’Sullivan asked Carroll why Lombard wasn’t competing.

“An injury,” said Carroll.

“What kind of injury?” asked O’Sullivan.

“A pretend injury,” came the reply.

There was perhaps only one man who understood as well as Carroll did that it took a lifetime’s slog for a top athlete to do what Lombard had done in little more than a year. That man was John Treacy, the only other Irishman who had run anywhere close to the time Lombard ran in Stanford. It just so happened that part of Treacy’s remit as chief executive of the Irish Sports Council was to catch doping cheats.

On the basis of his dramatic improvements over 5,000m and 10,000m, an order was given to target Lombard for out-of-competition testing, looking specifically for evidence of EPO use. Five such tests had been ordered on him since the start of the year, which may have explained the edginess that O’Sullivan and several others detected in him.

Then, in early July, a second package containing EPO, mailed to him from a supplier in Brazil, was intercepted by Customs and sent to the Irish Medicines Board for analysis. Someone recognised his name and tipped off the Irish Sports Council, which decided to perform one more out-of-competition test on him before Athens. His athlete location form revealed that he was in St Moritz, making his final Olympic preparations. On Sunday, July 11th, just after 7am, two testers called on him at his address in the Albula Alps to request a sample of his urine.

Doonan said he was sickened by what he described as Lombard’s betrayal of his trust. Carroll said he felt maligned by the suggestion that athletes needed to dope in order to go to the Olympics

If Lombard knew he’d been caught in the act, he showed no evidence of it, according to Carroll, who was also completing his training in St Moritz. “The funny thing is, I had come full circle at that point,” he remembered later. “I didn’t want to have anything to do with him in Switzerland, but we both ended up training at the same place. I saw first-hand the way he trained and prepared. He was so meticulous he’d make you feel like an amateur. I started thinking that maybe I called this thing wrong.”

It would be fascinating to know what Lombard was thinking in the days and weeks that followed. Twenty years on, he’s not inclined to say. But it seemed he decided to carry on as if nothing had happened. He travelled to Tirrenia, near Pisa, the quiet corner of Italy he’d told me about, where he was planning to sit out the start of the Olympics, and where presumably he now waited for the call to tell him that the game was up.

When the announcement of his positive test was revealed at the start of August, he immediately admitted his guilt, claiming that drugs were a fact of life in modern athletics and that he’d taken EPO simply to “get on the playing field”.

Unsurprisingly, his sport turned on him. Doonan said he was sickened by what he described as Lombard’s betrayal of his trust. Carroll said he felt maligned by the suggestion that athletes needed to dope in order to go to the Olympics, while O’Sullivan said the claim was a slur on every Irish athlete who had qualified for Athens.

Lombard, who now owns his own solicitor’s practice in Mallow, never spoke publicly about what happened again. Recently, I asked him whether he’d be prepared to meet up, 20 years after our last interview, perhaps to offer a fresh insight into why he did what he did. He didn’t return my emails or calls.

I heard from him only once after the day when we shared a plate of biscuits in his mother’s living room. It was a text out of nowhere shortly after those Olympics ended. He reminded me that I’d asked him if he’d ever taken drugs and he lied to my face – and for that he wanted to say he was truly sorry.