No more running from his demons
Brian Kirwan Photo: michaelorourkephotography.ie
A gifted athlete has gone public on his problems with gambling. Brian Kirwan of the St Laurence O’Tooles club in Carlow is a former international middle-distance runner, a multiple Odlum Cup winner and a winner at events all over Ireland.
He has now revealed that his problems with gambling saw him lose friends, lose the respect of his fellow athletes and most of all, through his own fault, lose contact with his daughter and the mother of his child. He blames nobody but himself but says he has now acknowledged his issues and is out to make amends.
His memory of an athletics career goes back to the late 1990s where he was initially coached by James O’Rourke in St Laurence O’Tooles. He trained in exalted company.
“We had a good group of athletes there at the time. James had his own kids. Danny Darcy from Bagenalstown was there. Andrew Murphy from Bennekerry. Kevin Lawler from the town. We trained hard. We started winning Leinster cross-country team events. All-Ireland team events,” recalled Brian.
“On the track we were all entered in individual events. Because we put in a lot of hard work over the winter months, we were successful and found our own paths. Danny was a great 1500-meter runner. I was a good steeplechaser. Kevin Lawler, a great distance runner. We were all good over 1500m but never as successful as Danny. He was a different machine altogether.” No matter what it was, the group trained together. They may not have been in the same class as Darcy who was a 3 min 43 sec 1500 metre runner but the teenage friends all contributed to the good vibes within the group.
In their late teens all had varied ambitions and chose different career paths. None opted to go to America. They stayed in Ireland and found different coaches. Brian still talks about those days.
Before leaving school, they ground out results at secondary and club level. Particularly in the cross-country events constantly aiming for a top-eight place. Kirwan ran for Carlow CBS, Lawler for Presentation Carlow and Darcy represented De La Salle in Bagenalstown. That was winter fare but they were also mates on the track in St Laurence O’Tooles.
“From the early days we were all on Leinster underage teams. I think Danny and myself were just a small number of athletes to make five international schools teams in cross-country. I was always in the top eight in Ireland. Kevin and Danny the same,” noted Brian.
They competed against the English in the Home International competitions. Kirwan actually remembers lining up alongside Mo Farah who went on to win gold medals at the 5000m and 10,000m Olympics Games in successive years (2012 and 2016).
“It was always hard to beat the English. Danny always split one or two of them. We were always top 12-14 after that. We were probably second to England every year. One year I was sixteenth and Mo Farah was a minute ahead of the second guy. That was how good he was,” conceded Kirwan.
On leaving school, Brian didn’t progress to the next level where he had been making Irish selections but he was holding his own. He was running good times on track. He was running good cross-country races but he was finding it hard to win.
The Carlow athlete was offered an athletic scholarship in East Tennessee but Kirwan opted to go to Cork where he studied in CIT and trained under renowned athletics coach, Brother John Dooley. There were no real highlights. Just a group of friends, six athletes training together, working and living in Cork but racing all over the country. Somewhere around this time, Kirwan began to lose his way.
“Essentially we were a group of athletes who hadn’t gone on a scholarship to America but wanted to move outside their county. I spent a few years working and training in Cork. It was only when I made the move back home to Carlow that I was lost.”
It was at this point in this interview that Brian revealed he had fathered a child.
“My daughter was born in 2004. The year I did my Leaving Certificate. I was 19. Her mother looked after her. She did a great job,” conceded Brian, who also agrees with the suggestion that he had been selfish.
“I travelled up and down the best I could. Lots of times I didn’t travel. For a long time my daughter was not in my life. She wasn’t there. Neither of them were. I was young at the time.. I wanted to be away.”
He agrees he abdicated his responsibilities.
“Yes. 100%. If I had the bit of sense I have now in my life, I wouldn’t have gone to Cork.”
The relationship between the mother of his daughter and the athlete fizzled out. Friends yes, but that was all.
“There were weeks when I was racing I didn’t travel to Carlow. I could have gone two to three weeks without seeing my daughter. It was hard but they were the choices I made.”
By 2012 he was back home living with his father in John Sweeney Park.
He had lost his mother (Geraldine) when he was only six years of age.
“To this day, it still affects me. I remember when I moved back from Cork, PL Curran was my coach then. I won my first county title. I carried a picture of my Mam. My Dad (Brian) found it tough. He reared four boys on his own.”
Sport saved the athlete at that time where he rubbed shoulders with the likes of Derek Hayden and high jumper, Brendan Callinan. Going forward to his return from Cork, the athlete recognised life had changed for him.
“Things started to go pear-shaped a little. I didn’t fall back into a job when I came back to Carlow,” he recounted.
“I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I was chopping and changing coaches. I won my first county adult title in 2012. That was it then. There was no progress. No international selections,” he recalled.
There were two betting shops in the area. He drifted into them. Kirwan cannot recall what his first bet was but it won. He didn’t know a lot about horse-racing at the time but he knew who AP McCoy and Ruby Walsh were. They rode winners. Plenty of them. Kirwan reckoned he could count on them a lot of the time.
“I was making money but I was giving it back. I was never successful. Nobody is ever successful at it. I didn’t know how to walk out. I enjoyed my time in there. I loved it,” is how he describes his path to addiction.
For the first number of years, he was betting with his own money. He wasn’t attracting any attention at that stage but he was getting in deeper.
“Nobody knew. Nobody does know, only yourself. You let on. People don’t let on they are in deep but so many people are in deep,” explained Kirwan.
By modern standards, his bets were not huge but they were hurting him.
“Small bets accumulating into big bets. It got to a stage in 2016-17 that I was borrowing money. You are borrowing money off friends, family.”
There were times he went for weeks without having any money. He wasn’t working. He would pick up his social welfare cheque on a Tuesday and it would be gone by evening time. This way helped conceal his problem.
“I was living at home. My father thought I was having a casual bet, a social bet. That was fine. He was buying the food, cooking for me, putting a roof over my head. I would give my Dad rent during the week but a lot of the time, I was letting myself down.”
While his private life was in turmoil Brian was involved in the Odlum Cup events and doing well in the likes of the Rockford Road Race in Tinryland.
Then ill-health visited the former international runner.
“Rock bottom was 2017 when I was diagnosed with Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD). Something I had never experienced before and I know it was down to stress. Over those years, the bets were getting bigger. I was spending more time in the betting office. I had jobs at the time but I was abusing my position,” noted Brian.
“Once it got to the stage where I was borrowing money, things changed. Taking money out, borrowing from friends, telling them it was for something else. I was not paying back. Even when I was not borrowing money, they were copping on. I had a job in Woodies. I was working full-time in Woodies. I had money. I didn’t need to borrow money.”
He had got to a point where he couldn’t buy a car and house hunting was out of the question.
“I couldn’t support my child. At this stage, my child was a teenager.”
Getting loans brought his problem on an insidious journey.
“I didn’t know at the time how serious it was. It did get worse over time. I haven’t had a flare up in a long time now but in 2017 to 2021, I had stomach pains, passing blood, admissions to Kilkenny Hospital,” he recalled.
He did a little running but his condition kept giving him trouble. Slowly he started to work out what was happening.
“It couldn’t have been anything else. I had no allergies. I was healthy, I was fit but mentally I was gone. I was telling lies. Borrowing money. Losing friends. Family not wanting to speak to you. At that stage I knew people knew.”
In 2019 he spent two weeks in Kilkenny Hospital where he underwent a series of tests and underwent further internal examinations. Even in his lowest moment, he was receiving texts from people who he owed money too. They wanted to be paid. He had touched people he hardly knew. He told lies to prospective sponsors telling them he needed the money for warm-weather training abroad.
“People who gave me money probably didn’t know I was deep into gambling. They probably felt I was a good runner, successful and needed money to go somewhere. There were weekends when I did go abroad training but most of it was all a lie,” confessed Brian.
Brian looked deep into his soul.
“I had to stop. I had to find a way to stop. I didn’t turn to anyone for help. I did get advice but I needed to do it myself. I knew I had to stop myself.
He started to question himself. His daughter was a teenager now and was a successful sports person too.
“I knew before she turned 16 I had to stop. I knew if I didn’t stop I was going to lose her, I was going to lose my family. It had got to the stage where my Dad knew, my aunts knew. I abused my employers. I had got money in advance from them. I knew at that stage everyone knew.”
One of his last bets spoke volumes to how he deep he had gone. It was in 2019. He backed Frankie Dettori in a five-horse accumulator in a Dubai meeting. At that stage, he was convinced he knew horse-racing inside out. Four of his choices came up and Brian had €1000 in his pocket. In a matter of hours, he had given it all back when he spent the evening in the bookie office betting on virtual racing.
It was the final straw. He asked the person behind the counter for a self-exclusion form which would bar him for life from all bookie offices.
“I had never heard of it up to then. Nobody does. The longest you can bar yourself for is 99 years. You cannot walk into a betting shop again,” he explained.
It was still long odds that Kirwan would beat his addiction. After all, he would not be known if he had walked into a bookie office anywhere else in Ireland. Yet he dug in.
“I knew that was it. Once you bar yourself from one shop, you bar yourself from all shops. I remember a week after that, I walked into a shop in Gorey and I was asked to leave.
“I knew if I walked into a shop in Carlow, I would be barred. I walked the town of Carlow, signed a self-exclusion in every shop in Carlow. I downloaded a Gambling Awareness App on my phone.”
He fought hard to overcome his addiction. He had to contend with a lot of people who he had hurt and let down.
“I couldn’t go into a betting shop but I was still hungry to have a bet. At that stage, I was trying to pay back people and trying to explain to people what I had gone through. I am convinced people thought I was lying and making up excuses for the last six months. I don’t think people believed that I had barred myself from the shop.”
Covid then came and with the shops all closed it was a blessing for Brian.
He read the book, Tony 10, about another Carlow man who was addicted to gambling and subsequently spent time behind bars. He marvelled at how a fellow Carlow man went so low but made a recovery.
“I remember sitting in a lounge in Dublin Airport having a pint of Guinness and reading Tony’s book. I thought I was in debt. Tony was so far ahead of me. My debt accumulated to around €5,000 which is not a lot, but it is a lot when you have no money. Then when you get your wages you have no money to pay.”
Life was settling down for Brian and he and his new girlfriend had a baby girl. The relationship didn’t last but he remains on good terms with the mother of his child who is four years of age now.
He attended a Gamblers Anonymous meetings in Kilkenny where, after the sessions, a close friend brought him back to Carlow after they had trained together.
The runner spent 16 weeks regularly attending meetings away from Carlow where he felt he wasn’t able to go that public on his addiction. Yet he knows gambling is all around.
In 2020, St Laurence O’Tooles organised a fund-raising race night. Brian was training at the time. It was a test he passed with flying colours. It wasn’t the only time temptation came his way.
“I went to it. I remember going and sat there the whole night without even one bet. I sat and watched. I wouldn’t do the lotto. I wouldn’t do a scratch card. I wouldn’t do anything. When the Olympics were on in 2021, people were texting me asking who was going to win and saying they were going to put a bet on. Somebody would say this runner was even money and would he win? I would tell them not to have a bet.”
Meanwhile he is back running. He had put up 15kg since he stopped running. His Irritable Bowel Disease has not returned for quite some time. He has a regular job and has a good relationship with both his daughters and the mothers of his children.
There are regrets but he has to put those behind him now.
“I want to have a good name again. I want to buy a car. If there is anyone who I have let down in the past, I apologise to them. I hate seeing young people going into betting offices. A five-minute chat with me, I could turn them off it straight away,” he said.
The reformed gambler is critical of the betting shops who have self-exclusion forms but fail to communicate this to people who get themselves in too deep.
He can have a drink such as a pint of Guinness but, for him, that is it. He wants to get back running at a high level. He has the ambition to try and match the six-county titles he has already won. He says he has never run a marathon but feels he is ready to prepare for one.
“I am running 70km a week. I still believe there is an awful lot left in me. I believe I can do a lot. I will be 40 in September. I believe I can take part in the over 40 Europeans next year,” he suggests.
The reformed gambler hopes he can renew and progress a relationship with those who he should have remained close to. He loves watching his oldest daughter playing sports and goes to see her as often as he can. He is fiercely proud of her.
“I am spending the last few years trying to be a better person and trying to give my family all my support. I also have an excellent bunch of friends at the moment. They may not realise but they have all helped me through this in their own ways by just being normal friends,” Kirwan confides.
