Thomas Kiely made a significant contribution to sport.
By Dr. Tom Hunt, GAA History Committee
Today, July 4 marks the 120th anniversary of Tom Kiely’s victory in the All-Around Championship at the St Louis Olympic Games, a competition that is recognised by the International Olympic Committee as being part of the 1904 Games programme.
A native of Ballyneale, County Tipperary, Tom Kiely sailed from Queenstown, on 26 May 1904, aboard the White Star Line Teutonic and arrived at New York on 2 June 1904. The Teutonic’s manifest, records that Tom Kiely’s passage was paid by a ‘friend’. This friend was almost certainly William Prendergast, a native of Clonmel and a former secretary of the GAA (January 1888-89), who emigrated to New York in 1892 where he joined the police force and dabbled successfully in the real estate business.
Kiely’s arrival in New York was greeted by a banner headline in The World newspaper: ‘Tom Kiely, Esq. comes all the way from Ireland to trim best athletes in America.’ And, this was precisely what happened. He remained in New York for three weeks and used Celtic Park as his training base, where he explained in 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.’
At St Louis, Kiely competed in the ten-event ‘All-Around Championship’, billed as the world championship. The events were the 100y, shot put, high jump, 880y walk, hammer throw, pole vault, 120y hurdles, 56lb throw, long jump and one-mile run. It was a true test of ability in which a competitor was rewarded for his efforts in all ten events. St Louis was hit by an all-day downpour on the day of the competition which added to the challenge. Kiely was in sixth place after the first three events, but a shared first place with Jack Holloway from Bansha in County Tipperary in the walk moved him to fifth place with Holloway in third place overall.
Three of the last six events were Kiely specialities and he won the hammer, the hurdles and the 56-lb weight throw to win the title ahead of American athletes Adam Gunn and Truxtun Hare. Holloway finished in fourth place, 763 points behind Tom Kiely. In the St Louis Star Kiely spoke of the severe test provided by the competition, a test made more difficult ‘when one has to go through it in five hours, in the face of a blinding rainstorm, on a new clay track, soaked with water and mud and is something more than I care to go through again’.
After leaving St Louis on 20 July, Tom Kiely visited some of the main cities of the North-Eastern USA including Chicago, Milwaukee, Buffalo, Syracuse, Detroit, Boston, Philadelphia and finally New York. He returned to Ireland on 7 October and was greeted in Queenstown by a party that included his near-neighbour Maurice Davin and was led by the President of the GAA, James Nowlan and its Honorary Secretary, Luke O’Toole.
The group boarded a tender and intercepted the liner Celtic before it entered the harbour to greet Kiely. On landing at Queenstown, the party adjourned to the Kilmurray Hotel where the officers of the GAA presented Tom Kiely with an illuminated address designed by Dublin artist, Thomas Fitzpatrick. The bilingual address welcomed Kiely 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 address included the names of the leading officials of the GAA and the members of the association’s Central Council. Kiely, in his response, credited the GAA with providing the foundation that made victory possible: ‘Irish athletes owe a great deal to the Gaelic Athletic Association … if it were not for the competitions under the Gaelic Athletic Association and the observance by committees of the rule which provides for a proportion of weights and jumps in the programmes, and which as a consequence encourage the practice of weight throwing and jumping, I would never hope for success in St Louis’.
Tom Kiely was undoubtedly the greatest athlete of Ireland’s greatest athletics period. Kiely displayed an obsessional and incessant competitive zeal as he travelled the length and breadth of Ireland in a career that stretched over twenty-one seasons between 1888 and 1908. During this time he won over 1,000 prizes, five Amateur Athletic Association hammer throwing titles, in addition to fifty- three national titles under both the GAA and Irish Amateur Athletic Association dispensations in running, jumping and throwing events.
Kiely retired undefeated in all-around competitions and his domination of the Irish championships was a significant factor in the ending of the event. The Kiely legend was established on 10 September 1892 with an extraordinary performance in the GAA All-Ireland championships. Staged at the Jones’s Road venue for the first time, Kiely in a feat of athletics domination unmatched in the history of Irish sport, won seven titles on the day including the long and triple jump, the 120 yard hurdles and four different weight throwing events. Tom Kiely was well past his best as an athlete when he travelled to St Louis in 1904.
Tom Kiely was officially recognised as an Olympic champion in 1969 over 65 years after the event was held and almost 20 years after the great champion’s death.