When Kieran Duggan offered Ireland's Olympic rowers a lift home from the airport, he didn't expect them to take him up on it.

After all, Paul O'Donovan and Fintan McCarthy are cherished celebrities in Ireland, having just won back-to-back gold medals in the men's lightweight double sculls final.

But when Duggan and his friends struck up a conversation with the duo on a plane from France to Dublin on Tuesday, McCarthy admitted they hadn't arranged a ride for the three-hour drive to County Cork, and were planning to try and catch a bus from the Dublin Airport. 

"Five of us kind of looked at each other thinking, did he actually say that? And then one of the guys said, 'Kieran is actually going to Cork.'  And I said, 'I've room in the car,'" Duggan told As It Happens guest host Catherine Cullen. 

"Fintan, to our surprise, just turned around to me and said, 'I might take you up on that.'"

'I better wait'

After they had deplaned, the athletes headed off to collect their luggage, and Duggan's friends all went their separate ways. 

"I just said to one of the lads, 'I better wait because he sounded quite genuine,'" Duggan said.

When 20 minutes passed with no sign of the medallists, Duggan says he figured they must have been swept into some kind of VIP area and were "already in a car already halfway down the road to Cork."

Then the pair emerged, and the people in the airport broke into applause. 

"When the cheering died down, I just caught Fintan's eye and I walked over to them. I  just asked if he still needed that lift," Duggan said. "He said, 'That'd be great if you don't mind.' And I said, 'Absolutely.'"

Duggan works in sales in Mallow, County Cork, and had been in Versailles, France, to watch the equestrian events with his friends at the Olympics.

He offered to take home as many athletes as he could fit. He ended up chauffeuring McCarthy, O'Donovan and their fellow Team Ireland rower Natalie Long.

"So I had three Olympians in the car," he said.

Had the athletes taken the bus, it would have been a tight squeeze. Duggan says it took 15 minutes to fit the rowers' luggage into his vehicle. They packed the trunk to the brim, then put rest in the backseat, where it was piled so high, O'Donovan and Long couldn't see each other. 

"They had a hell of a lot of bags," he said. 

When they hit the road, Duggan says the ride started very quietly.

"I didn't want to ask too many questions," he said. 

But after 20 minutes or so, he says O'Donavan noticed a picture of Duggan's kids and started asking him questions about his family. After that, the conversation flowed easily. 

"The whole thing was just so simple that it was actually remarkable," he said.

Why did they need a ride, anyway?

The athletes, it turned out, had been a bit slap-dash when making their travel arrangements. 

McCarthy was only coming home long enough to drop off a bunch of luggage before heading back to Paris for the closing ceremonies. O'Donovan, meanwhile, is a doctor in the city of Cork, and had to get back to work before taking off again for the World Rowing Championships later this month.

"So we didn't really have anything organized for going home," McCarthy told The Southern Star's Star Sport podcast. "So thank God. He saved the day, really," 

Asked about McCarthy's remarks, Duggan said: "I'm the lucky one here. There's no two ways about it."

Duggan took the rowers to their homes, and declined their offers of gas money.

"We got a door-to-door service," McMarthy told Star Sport. "It was brilliant."

Duggan did, however, make one request of the rowers — a selfie he could present as evidence of the once-in-a-lifetime encounter.

They happily obliged. 

"If this was the age of before social media, no one would believe me that this happened," Duggan said.