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Brendan Moran was hoping for a quiet day. The Olympics always has some surprise – doped horses, marathon-crashing priests – but this morning seemed like an opportunity for some downtime. “There’s always something that gets thrown up, it’s the nature of the games,” says the acclaimed photographer with Sportsfile.
The 2016 Olympics had been no different. The Irish boxers had been the story from the moment the boxer Michael O’Reilly’s failed drugs test became news. It had continued from there with the defeat of Michael Conlan in controversial circumstance.
In the background the simmering news story of the arrest of an Irishman who allegedly had tickets issued by the OCI in his possession.
Moran thought this day, August 17, was when they could get a break: “We knew there was only a limited amount of Irish competitors that day.”
His colleague Ramsey Cardy was going to wander around the Olympic village, get some pictures of volleyball or BMX biking. Covering the Olympics in normal times is one of the great gigs as a sports journalist for this reason. If you have spare time, you can walk into any event and sit and watch without a ticket before moving on to something else.
That was the idea and then, with one text, “the plan went out the window for the day”.
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Shane Ross had been anticipating a different kind of Olympics. “Cheering on our national athletes during the daytime and dining in one of those lovely restaurants on Copacabana Beach at night would not be the worst part of the job,” he wrote in his memoir, In Bed with the Blueshirts.
“I had anticipated a week of medals for Ireland, of pleasure mixed with a modicum of hard work,” Ross wrote. The reality would be different.
Four days after the arrest of Kevin Mallon, the Irishman who was a director of THG, Pat Hickey, the longstanding president of the Olympic Council of Ireland, issued a statement. There was “no impropriety whatsoever from anyone in the OCI or myself in the dealing of tickets”.
On August 12, the firm that was officially authorised to resell OCI tickets PRO 10 Sports Management said Mallon had been holding tickets on their behalf as they didn’t have a representative in the country. On Morning Ireland that day, Shane Ross said he would like an independent person involved in the inquiry.
“I think it would be wrong at this stage to say whether Pat Hickey is suitable or is not suitable,” he said. “We’re going to carry out a very robust inquiry into what’s happening… What we’ve got to do… is to make an assessment now of whether these inquiries are adequate to satisfy the dissatisfaction of the Irish people.”
There was pressure on Pat Hickey, but most people who had watched him operate over the years expected him to swat it away.
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The Irish writer Paul Howard was working as a journalist at the Sunday Tribune at the time of Hickey’s rise.
“He was one of those Fianna Fail type figures who would have been regarded sceptically by many in the media but he just looked after his base so well that nobody could move him,” Howard says.
Howard remembers some of those challenges and how Hickey would see him off. The most formidable came from Richard Burrows, the former governor of the Bank of Ireland.
“When Richard Burrows challenged him for the leadership of the OCI in 2004, there was no chance that Hickey was ever going to lose,” Howard says.
The contrasting campaigns highlighted the differences between the urbane, genial Burrows and the streetfighter Hickey.
“Burrows hired a PR guy and he invited all of the sports that the OCI represented to a meeting in the National Stadium at which he was going to outline his plan for the future of the Irish Olympic movement. While he was doing that Hickey was knocking on the doors of those same organisations and telling them how much money he was going to give them,” Howard says.
“You’ve got this urbane, sophisticated, gentleman of the world – Richartd Burrows – it’s just so lofty, inviting them to a meeting and Hickey knocks on the door, he does the Fianna Fail thing.”
Howard recalls talking to one voter who laid out how it worked.
“I spoke to a guy from the Irish Weighlifting Association and that’s exactly what he said to me, ‘Hickey’s just left here. I brought him into the sitting room and we had a cup of tea and he told me we’re getting x amount of funding next year and Richard Burrows has invited me to a meeting where I’m not going to get to talk to him. I’m going to listen to him outline his vision’.”
As he secured his power base, Hickey also exercised vigorously his right to a good name.
“We never had a case that went to court, but we got a lot of legal letters over the years,” Howard says.
“Once Pat identified that I was hostile to him, pretty much everything I wrote about him got a solicitor’s letter. They were warning letters. He had an understanding of how it worked. If our barrister Hugh Mohan had three letters from Pat Hickey about me then every time I wrote about Hickey I would have to sit down with Hugh Mohan and go through the piece word by word and, eventually you’d ask yourself is it worth writing this piece or publishing this piece.”
Howard recalls one letter at the time of a challenge to Hickey by David Balbirnie. “I wrote a piece on the election and Hickey identified 40 libels in an 800 word piece. It wasn’t a long piece, it was bottom of the page. Hickey’s picture was darker than Balbirnie’s and he was convinced that this was sinister. The solicitor’s letter said the picture was printed darker to make him out to be a shadowy figure. It was darker because whoever was making the plates at the printers for the Tribune only had one eye so the paper was always slightly out of register.”
These letters could be wearing but Howard says, that was the extent of them. “You would always brace yourself for a second or third letter but they never came, it never really went anywhere.”
Hickey’s vigorous protection of his reputation and the cultivation of his power base may have encouraged him to believe the dangers in Rio were not severe.
Kevin Mallon had been arrested on August 5, by Brazilian police after allegedly selling tickets at “extremely high prices”. Mallon was a director of a firm called THG and it was alleged that some of the tickets in his possession originated with the OCI.
The OCI promised an inquiry. In his book, Ross recalls his reaction to what Hickey was suggesting. “Before I got to Rio I made it clear I wasn’t happy that he was setting up an inquiry that wasn’t independent and we were already in a public brawl about it,” Ross says. Later an email would emerge from a Hickey adviser suggesting that he “put Shane Ross back in his box”.
Ross was determined to get what the government wanted. He says now that when sporting bodies stand off with governments there is only one winner, but that wasn’t necessarily how it felt at the time.
In his memoir, Ross recalls:
“The president of the OCI had told Philip Bromwell [on Prime Time] about the composition of the OCI committee seeking answers from the OCI about the OCI. The investigators were to be none other than OCI vice president, Willie O’Brien, OCI general secretary, Dermot Henehan, and the OCI’s legal adviser and a senior counsel, Siobhán Phelan. The alarm bells, which had already been humming, began ringing loudly. The OCI itself was looking into how OCI tickets had come into the hands of Kevin Mallon and other individuals. The temperature was rising by the hour.”
When Ross arrived in Rio, he went to meet Hickey.
“The moment that we entered the meeting room, I knew that Hickey and I were not going to part as friends,” Ross wrote. “The mood music was grim. Hickey was waiting with his vice president, Willie O’Brien, a long-time Hickey loyalist who had been on the council of the OCI for twenty years. In front of us sat all that was wrong with the OCI. Older men, in office for far too long, ready to put a politician ‘in his box’ for daring to challenge them. After I had opened the conversation with a plea for no confrontation, but for an agreement, I suggested that any inquiry into the ticket-touting events in Rio should be a joint venture between the Irish government and the OCI. Mistrust surfaced in the first minute. Hickey interrupted me. He wanted the meeting recorded.”
Ross wanted an independent presence on the inquiry or the government would set up their own.
Hickey rejected this because, as he put it later, his advice was that the OCI inquiry had to be free of any “political or religious interference”.
“Minister Ross arrived in Rio and I had a meeting with him that evening with his private secretary and I had the first vice president Willie O’Brien with me,” Hickey told Paul Williams. “We had been advised by senior counsel that for our internal inquiry into the ticket situation, how Kevin Mallon ended up with these tickets that we were not allowed have an outsider because we have to be autonomous.”
The meeting ended and Hickey spoke smoothly to the media about how well everything went while insisting he was limited in what he could say because an Irishman, Kevin Mallon, was currently in a Rio jail. Overall the meeting had been “excellent” he said. Ross had a different view and he gave it to the media.
He was “stunned’, he said. “We just met a brick wall,” Ross told reporters. “I have said all along I don’t think the OCI inquiry is credible because they are a major player in this particular controversy. So I think it would have been far preferable and more sensible and it would have been a credible committee in which I could have had confidence if there was an independent to sit on it. Now I feel that the committee is flawed from the beginning.”
In his book, Ross recalled the media response:
“Back home, the opposition gleefully interpreted the showdown as a bloody nose for the minister, an amateur who had been outfoxed by Hickey, just like those ministers who had tangled with the maestro in the past. I had emerged empty-handed. They were right, but there were many more rounds to go. It was becoming apparent that the difficulties ran far beyond the immediate need for an inquiry with at least one member of the panel being independent of the OCI. The OCI itself was the problem.”
Hickey said what he called “a peace plan” was brokered by Kieran Mulvey and after their Sunday night meeting, Ross again met Hickey on the Tuesday in the Windsor Marapendi Hotel with the IOC’s Director General Christophe De Kepper.
That afternoon, Ross recalled this week, Hickey took great delight in demonstrating the circles he moved in as a high level member of the IOC. “The thing that struck me was that he was very impressed by princes of this and heads of that and he was very impressed by people like that. That’s what gave him his buzz.”
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Brendan Moran got a text at 7.30 in the morning of August 17th. “I remember getting a text saying Pat Hickey had been arrested and I was like, ‘What…what’s this now?’”
Hickey had been arrested at the Windsor Marapendi hotel and then taken to the Hospital Samoritano where Moran would be one of the photographers entering into a two-day stakeout.
Ramsey Cardy’s day at the volleyball went out the window. “We’ve got to find out what’s going on, we’ve got to get someone to the hospital, we have to find out where the police station is.”
On the first day, Moran spent the whole day at the hospital wondering if he was wasting his time. “It was like a real old news stakeout and meanwhile they were taking grabs from the television. We didn’t know if there was a picture here. Ideally we’re looking for a glimpse of Mr Hickey, but he was in the hospital so it must be serious so we were also waiting for a statement. But the video had gone viral and that dragged a lot of people into the hurricane.”
“It was like a movie,” Pat Hickey said when he reflected on his arrest for a podcast in 2017.
On the second day, Brendan Moran went to the Olympic Stadium to cover Thomas Barr. Journalists were beginning to arrive from Ireland having jumped on a plane the day before. Moran got to the hospital at lunchtime and took over from a colleague who had been there since 5am.
Moran thought they had a good chance for a picture because of the unusual layout of the hospital car park
“When the cars left the hospital there was a one-way system. When they came up out of the car park they had to turn right and go down to the end of the car park and turn left so there was two chances to get them.”
But then the car pulled up and every window, including the front windscreen was blacked out. There would be no picture of Pat Hickey in the car. “That would have been the usual kind of picture.”
Instead there was another picture. “We were at the top of the ramp and then a cop car arrived and went down and then a darker car arrived and went down. You watch over there and I’ll watch over here. You could end up with nothing at it.”
By this stage, Moran knew how big it was. Sportsfile was getting calls from around the world looking for pictures. “It was just a case of staying alert and staying awake,’ he says.
“Eventually the door opened.” Moran knew Hickey. “I knew Pat a long time. I didn’t expect a wheelchair but I knew it was him. It was the only picture of the day. With the sign above being ‘exit’ in Portuguese, it was a good image.”
Meanwhile journalists were heading to a Brazilian police press conference which would add to the drama.
Neil O’Riordan was covering the Olympics for The Sun. He thinks the idea that it was a terrible Olympics for Ireland can be over-egged but he does recall being in the hotel with English colleagues as they ran through the day’s haul and, even for scale, feeling Ireland was having a different games.
“Brendan Moran rang me and was going to the hospital. We went to what as a mixture of a police station and a court.”
The police conducted a press conference there where they showed Hickey’s passport and documentation for people to take pictures. “I took the pictures but I didn’t post them online because it didn’t seem quite right that you would publish them,” O’Riordan said.
“We were told Hickey was probably going to be brought back there because there were holding cells.”.
When the press conference ended, the journalists were moved outside the police station which was located opposite a favela.
“We were then told by the private security force guarding the police station that it wasn’t safe for us to be there. Initially we were laughing, but they said, ‘No it’s quite common for them to fire from the favela at the police station so we can’t guarantee your safety’. They weren’t that keen to let us back in but as it got darker, they let us back inside the perimeter wall.”
They spent eight hours at the police station and then the story was moving on. Moran had the picture.
“The picture of him in the wheelchair is the one that tells the story,” Moran says. After several days in Bangu prison, Hickey was placed on house arrest before finally returning to Ireland.
Ross says he felt some sympathy for Hickey.
“Personally, yes I did, I felt sorry, he was in poor health. I spent the day with him the day before and we didn’t get on particularly well, but for anyone to be arrested in a Brazilian jail a long way from home was a really horrible place for him to be. We weren’t friends but it was very difficult for him.”
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It wasn’t until December that Hickey returned to Ireland and a changed world and to a power base that had ebbed away.
“It has been an extremely traumatic few months for myself and my family,” he said. “Once again I wish to state that I am totally innocent of all charges against me. I intend to adhere to any requests made by the Brazilian authorities and I will do everything possible to clear my name so that I can, in due course, get on with my life with my wife and family.”
The man who dispensed largesse and solicitor’s letters was weakened.
“It was my job to be hostile to him,” Howard says, “and to ask questions of him. Small ones like his international judo record which we couldn’t find evidence that he’d competed at the level he’d claimed he did. There was that stuff and then in later years his relationship with John Delaney. There was the gear issue with Sonia. There was just always controversies. There was always things to ask Pat Hickey about. He saw that as hostility to him but really I was just chasing stories at the time. When you had as many enemies as Hickey did, there was always people ringing you up.”
The OCI was reformed in the aftermath of Rio.
“At the end of the day, if you look at the final result of what happened for Irish sport it was good,” Ross says. “The OCI was reformed in a very radical way. That was a benefit of the fact that we confronted him in Rio.”
There may be something about Irish life that requires a cataclysmic event for change to take place. Only when Ben Dunne was hog-tied and carried naked through a Florida hotel did Ireland examine the intersection between money and politics; only when John Delaney failed in his attempt to prevent the Sunday Times publishing a story did the FAI change; only when Hickey was captured naked in his hotel room and taken to Bangu prison did the OCI change utterly.
“In the two sporting incidents there, too much power was in the hands of one man,” Ross says. “Politicians were very reluctant to tackle anyone in those situations because sport is naturally where they want good news stories to come out. I guess it tells you that there were areas of sport that were in dramatic need of reform.”
Ross says “the shoot out at the OK Corral” was only going to have one winner. “When sporting organisations take on governments, they tend to lose. I was always reasonably confident we would get what we wanted,” Ross says.
The Moran report made the case for transformation at the OCI and also cleared Hickey of all criminal wrongdoing. The 226-page report highlighted a lack of transparency and accountability at the OCI. Hickey, it said, merely informed colleagues on the executive rather than consulted them.
None of the key figures opted to co-operate with the report because it might impact on the ongoing criminal investigation in Brazil.
In Brazil in 2017, the Supreme Court suspended the case against Hickey and the other accused. They all denied wrongdoing. The Supreme Court would examine the merits of the prosecution case.
Hickey is an innocent man but a man who lost all power. How he amassed it and why remains something of a curiosity.
“It’s purely the parish pump. He rewrote the rules of the OCI to allow every single sport to have equal sway which is completely ludicrous,” Howard says.
“Synchronised swimming where we’ve never had a single rep would have the same power as athletics. Up until Hickey arrived the BLE ran the Olympic movement in Ireland and probably rightly so, but Hickey gave them equal power.”
Ross looks back on it now and says, “He was a very vain man”. He went to some lengths for that vanity.
“I never really saw what he was getting out of it, apart from the ego trip involved,” Paul Howard says. “Calling to the door of the chairman of the Irish Weightlifting Association on a Friday evening is nobody’s idea of a fun night.”
