Even if there’s no guarantee of a safe trajectory, the storied history of Irish athletics has started a new chapter.
The penultimate night of the World Athletics Championships in Tokyo set the scene with two compelling characters.
Firstly, with Kate O’Connor taking her place among the very best multi-event women in the world, once again going where no Irish athlete has gone before, and she’s only getting started.
And secondly, with the clear and present prospect of Cian McPhillips becoming the men’s middle-distance global star the country has been craving for decades.
RM Block
Together they turned it into virtual dream-time when McPhillips ran himself into fourth place in the final of the men’s 800 metres, just over 70 minutes after O’Connor secured her silver medal in heptathlon. At the start of this year, or indeed going back many years, neither of those two results were conceivable.
Both McPhillips and O’Connor also knocked their own Irish records out of Japan’s National Stadium. McPhillips broke the 800m record for the second time in 48 hours, the 23-year-old from Longford clocking 1:42.15 to finish fourth, a time that would have won him the gold medal at every previous World Championships.
O’Connor’s Irish record in the heptathlon of 6,714 points, smashing her own tally 6,487 set in July, was built around her amazing capacity to produce five personal bests in the seven events.
Starting with the 100m hurdles, high jump and 200m on Friday, she then set lifetime bests in the javelin and finally the 800m on Saturday.
In between, she also injured her right knee in the long jump, which might well have unsettled a lesser athlete. O’Connor’s response was to calmly refocus then summon all her steely grit to run 2:09.56 in the 800m, taking a second off her previous best.
“It’s just insane, words can’t describe how I feel, or the year that I’ve had,” said O’Connor, the 24-year-old from Dundalk already enjoying two breakthrough indoor performances in the five-event pentathlon back in March – winning European Indoor bronze, then World Indoor silver.
“I’ve never really come to a championship before and had as much pressure on my shoulders, not even from just people outside, but from myself. I expected big things, and always knew I was in with a shot of getting a medal. It’s one thing knowing that you’re capable of it, it’s another thing going and doing it.”
Anna Hall from the US won gold on 6,888 after leading the way from the second event. Taliyah Brooks, also of the US, and Britain’s defending champion Katarina Johnson-Thompson tied for third on 6,581, and there’s no doubting O’Connor was in the very best of them here, three-time Olympic champion Nafi Thiam from Belgium unable to start day two.
O’Connor was back at the National Stadium ahead of Sunday’s closing session, the medals presented in an open plaza under the stadium first built for the 1964 Olympics in Tokyo. On that occasion, Ireland had only one women’s competitor in Maeve Kyle, also the country’s first Olympic representative in athletics, who died last month at age 96.
Kyle was a true trailblazer for Irish women in sport, O’Connor channelling some of that spirit in her own way. She becomes only the sixth Irish athlete to win a medal on the World Championships stage, the seventh Irish medal won in all – and the first Irish athlete to win an outdoor multi-event medal.
Starting with Eamonn Coghlan’s gold in the 5,000m in the inaugural championships in Helsinki in 1983, Sonia O’Sullivan also won 1,500m silver in 1993, then 5,000m gold in 1995, and they were the last Irish medals one on the track. The last three medals have come in the race walks, Gillian O’Sullivan winning 20km silver in 2003, Olive Loughnane also winning 20km gold in 2009, before Rob Heffernan won the 50km gold in Moscow in 2013.
“And I’m so happy to win global medals, which hasn’t been done in a long, long time,“ added O’Connor. “Especially in multi-events, which hasn’t been done before. It’s a really special time. I’m getting very used to winning medals and I don’t really want to give that up. You can bet next year I’ll be back and looking to win some more.”
There’s no guarantee of any safe trajectory. Two years ago in Budapest, Ciara Mageean and Rhasidat Adeleke both finished fourth on successive nights – Mageean over 1,500m, then Adeleke over 400m.
Both missed out on Tokyo, Adeleke ending her season early due to a series injuries and setbacks, and Mageean was also recovering from an Achilles surgery before the announcement in July she’d started treatment for cancer.
O’Connor and McPhillips are also astutely aware of how fickle progression can be. O’Connor missed the delayed Tokyo Olympics in 2021 because of injury, and McPhillips has endured a series of injuries and illness since running 1:46.13 for 800m in 2021, the second fastest time indoors by an 18-year-old in European athletics history.
“It wasn’t far off a full Olympic final there, it took the three Olympic medal winners to beat me,” McPhillips said of his race, where he moved from eighth to fourth down the homestretch. “It would have been nice to get a medal, but we’ll leave that until next time.”
The new chapter is soon to be continued.
