Bend, Don’t Break
by Frank O’Mara

book review by Kevin McCarthy

When most of us reflect on the impact of sport on people’s lives, we probably gravitate towards the benefits of physical fitness, the camaraderie to be developed with teammates and, hopefully, opponents and the way sport teaches the rewards of dedication and determination.

Three-time Olympian and double World Indoor athletics champion, Frank O’Mara, would probably disagree with none of the above. His book Bend, Don’t Break is replete with examples of the impact of his sporting life on his life otherwise, almost all positive. Yet the book is so much more than that, a book which goes to the very heart of human courage and resilience, though O’Mara himself never uses such words to describe what he has done.

This is a book which is only partly, and certainly not primarily, about sport. It is, rather, a remarkable account of the Irish athlete being diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease at the age of 47 and at the height of a successful business career in Arkansas. It recounts his journey with the disease for 16 years and counting.

Sometimes it involves battling, sometimes coping but always you have the sense of O’Mara’s determination to give the disease as good a run for its money as possible.

Throughout Bend, Don’t Break there are many great insights into the skills, attitudes and values of Frank O’Mara the athlete. They are inherently the weapons he carries daily in his battle with Parkinson’s too.

Perhaps the incident which gives greatest evidence of the man’s steely determination is when he had been “adopted” (my word, not his) as Said Aouita’s pacemaker. Frank did this once or twice and was well rewarded for it. Yet, on an occasion when he wanted to run his own race, he was offered incrementally what even in today’s money was a huge reward to do the pacemaking instead, but stuck to his guns until the race organisers were just forced to find another pacemaker.

I have never met Frank, though we worked together remotely on a Limerick project a few years ago.

I remember him using the line “If you don’t stand for something, you will fall for anything” in referring to a mutual acquaintance whom we both admired. The same line crops up in Bend, Don’t Break and in many, many ways it sums up O’Mara himself. His integrity shines through without him ever highlighting it. He writes with great fluidity and honesty, admitting when he got races wrong, pulling out of what could have been his fourth Olympics because he knew he couldn’t do justice to the Irish vest, and acknowledging when he made mistakes in relation to choices in dealing with Parkinson’s.

The book is full of insights into the bonds of trust and friendship that O’Mara has built over his lifetime. His wife and family, his fellow athletes and a range of medical professionals who have accompanied him all feature hugely in the story. O’Mara brings us through a life well lived, from his childhood and schooldays in Limerick, to college and business in the USA. He concludes in retracing the exploits of Ernest Shackleton and literally in the individual footsteps of his fellow athlete Marcus O’Sullivan in Antarctica, while in his own fifteenth year of Parkinson’s. The determination to bend but not break remains undaunted by even the most daunting of challenges.

Bend, Don’t Break is a magnificent book, engrossing and enthralling in equal measure.

O’Brien Press of Dublin (www.obrien.ie)

€17.99

ISBN 978-1-78849-437-3