Born October 6th, 1928
Died July 23rd, 2025
In December 2012, when Maeve Kyle was presented with the Lifetime Achievement Award at The Irish Times/Sport Ireland luncheon in Dublin, she took the opportunity to remind people of her first Olympic experience in Melbourne in 1956.
It was in Melbourne that Kyle became the first woman to represent Ireland in athletics at any Olympic Games, qualifying in the 100m and 200m, and she told the told the story of how the news of her selection was greeted in a letter printed in this newspaper.
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“I was a disgrace to motherhood and the Irish nation,” she proudly recalled. “That’s what one letter in The Irish Times said. Imagine! A woman leaving her husband and daughter to go and run! But I suppose, yes, I went knocking on the door.”
Her award was presented that day by Ronnie Delany, who accompanied her on that maiden Olympic voyage of 1956, and wrote his own chapter in Irish sporting history by winning the gold medal in the 1,500m.
Kyle never won an Olympic medal, but would go on to compete in three Olympic Games, becoming a trailblazer for Irish women in sport, and a lasting inspiration to those who followed. Kyle, who died aged 96, packed was heavily involved in several different sports.
On that same day in Dublin, Katie Taylor was named the Sports Star of the Year, after her Olympic gold medal success in London 2012, a first for women’s boxing, and said Kyle definitely “opened the door for women in sport” and that to share the same stage with her was a real privilege.
Maeve was born in Urlingford, Co Kilkenny, and attended school at Kilkenny College, where her father, CG Shankey, was the headmaster. At age 10 she transferred to Alexandra College and later attended Trinity College Dublin, where her first sporting love was hockey. She would gain 46 Irish caps and represent three of the four Irish provinces, Leinster, Munster and Ulster: she was also named on the All Star team in 1953 and 1959, and inducted into the Hockey Ireland Hall of Fame in 2006.
As well as Melbourne, she also competed in the Rome Olympics in 1960 and in Tokyo in 1964, reaching the semi-finals of the 400m and 800m, her preferred distance. She also took bronze in the 400m at the 1966 European Indoor Athletics Championships in Dortmund.
Her sporting prowess didn’t end there: Kyle was equally deft at tennis, swimming, sailing and cricket.
In 1954 she married Seán Kyle, whom she met in Antrim with the Irish hockey squad in 1953, and they would spend their life in Ballymena. Their daughter Shauna was born later in 1954, and was two years old when Kyle was selected for her first Olympics in Melbourne.
By the time of the Tokyo Olympics in 1964, Shauna was 10, and recalled her mother taking her down to Dublin to be fitted with her Olympic blazer, thinking “that’s her off again for another while”, and wondering what she might bring home for her this time.
“Back then, in the Olympic Village, all the women were housed separately, totally fenced in, so no one could get to them,” Shauna told The Irish Times in 2020. “She later told us the story of a wrestler from Mongolia, who took a great fancy to her, and would wait outside the gates, and make various gestures to her, how they should get together.
“She managed to avoid him, and he went on to be one of the gong men at the start of the Rank films. That was a little secret in the family for the while. My father Seán wasn’t very impressed.”
At the Melbourne Olympics, Kyle was restricted to the 200m, the farthest a woman was allowed to run on the track at the time.
For Tokyo in 1964, she could run her preferred distances of 400m and 800m; she later confessed that the trip to Japan proved to be life-changing in another way. “I’d actually gone out there expecting to dislike the Japanese people quite intensely, which goes back to my childhood in Kilkenny. Cousins of my grandmother had got caught up in the second World War and ended up in Japanese prison camps. She’d actually written to De Valera to help secure their release. So I was not planning on liking Japan. Instead I found them to be the most incredibly fascinating people.
“It was an extraordinary opportunity for me, even after competing in Melbourne and Rome. Tokyo really made an enormous impression on me. More than any other Olympics it convinced me to dedicate more time to coaching, and to help afford other young athletes with similar opportunities.”
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With Seán, her husband and coach, she cofounded the Ballymena and Antrim Athletic Club, originally designed as a women’s club, although it soon had men on board too: she wasn’t one for any sort of separatism. She also fought for athletes from Northern Ireland to be free to compete in the National Track and Field Championships, during a period of suspension in the early years of the national governing body, Bord Lúthchleas na hÉireann.
Kyle began dedicating much of her life to coaching alongside her husband. Following her death, World Athletics president and double Olympic 1,500m champion Sebastian Coe recalled the story of how Kyle was tasked with the job of shouting out his 400m split time during his 800m world record attempt in Florence in June 1981. After passing that mark in 49.7 seconds, Kyle was too stunned to call out his split time; Coe went on to run 1:41.73, a world record that stood for 16 years.
She returned to the 2000 Olympics Sydney as an Irish team coach, and was later named life vice-president of Athletics Ireland. In a statement following her death, Athletics Ireland said Kyle was “a true pioneer of Irish sport and one of our most iconic and inspirational athletes; she was a torchbearer who lit the path for those who followed. Her legacy lives on in the athletes she inspired and the standards she set.”
Maeve Kyle was predeceased by her husband Seán, and survived by her daughter, Shauna
