Made an impact? Don't get me started. Sure, when Declan Hegarty went to LA in 1984, the joke was he was the man who had the contract to take down the stadium, only he arrived two weeks ear ly.

So he didn't hit the nail on the head then?

You could say that. The crazy thing is Hegarty was a hammer maestro, won every title there was as a young fella in Drimnagh and then went off on scholarship to Boston in 1977 and blew them away over there. He broke the Irish record in 1983 to qualify for LA so he was looking good.

What went wrong?

Sure what went right? His coach Phil Conway says hammer technique was in transition. Some guys were spinning three times in the circle before letting rip and other guys were going for four spins. Anyway, what with the pressure of the occasion, Hegarty got mixed up and kept putting the hammer into the safety cage; practically ripped it apart.

So he hit the cage, what's the big deal?

Hit it? He near ly demolished it. It's one thing doing it in practice, but in the first round of real competition the stadium guys had to come in and spend 20 minutes putting the cage back together. He had only three throws and the first two went 'wham' and 'bam' .

That must have made him a popular boy.

You could say that. Word spread like wildfire that some Irish guy was causing havoc and it was all over the Olympic Village in no time. Talk about making a name for yourself. Apparently, on the bus ride to the stadium that morning, Hegarty realised he had forgotten to put his number on his Irish jersey. Then he was making such a fuss of things that he put the jersey on backwards. His nerves were shot to bits.

So did he get one out of the cage?

Yeah, finally. But it wasn't good enough to make the final.

You've got to feel for the guy, he must have been devastated.

Well, a few months later Hegarty sat down and wrote a 15-page letter to Conway about how he was still coming to terms with it, about how the very time he wanted his technique to hold, it all fell apart. Then the bloody media had a go;

cartoons in the paper of him swinging a wrecking ball. Irish Runnermagazine said: "Rumour has it he just wanted to go out with a bang."

Well, you either cry or you laugh, I suppose.

What ever happened to him?

He broke the Irish record again in 1985 when he threw 77.8m, a mark that still stands today.

But a back injury ended his career soon after.

He's a surgeon now in South Carolina.

No place for a hammer in that line of work.