IT WAS NEWS to grey an Irish Olympics even as vivid and splashed with gold as this.
If Ciara Mageean didn’t have bad luck at the Olympic Games she wouldn’t have any luck at all.
She ran an Olympic standard qualifying time in 2011 but an ankle injury curbed her prospects of making it to London 2012. That injury stole 14 months of her career and while she qualified for the 2016 Games in Rio, she underwhelmed in finishing 11th in her semi-final.
“This is the beginning, this season is only the start,” she said at the time. “I will be back and I will be stronger.”
Unfortunately it was the start and pretty much the end. Mageean tore her calf a week before the Tokyo Games and while she ran anyway, she could not compete, finishing 10th in her heat.
She didn’t even make it to the starting line in Paris. Mageean became European champion in June and at that point everything seemed possible: the global competition is such that a medal was always going to be a brutally difficult ask, but the point was that Mageean was going to get a chance to fight for it.
We hear a lot about athletes needing to do themselves justice on the biggest stage: this was supposed to be the Games when the biggest stage did justice to Ciara Mageean.
But no. She was forced to withdraw on the eve of her 1500m heat in Paris, finally defeated by a chronic issue with her Achilles. Brutally, she had to give herself a taste of the Games to give herself a chance of making it to the start line, and she moved into the athletes’ village last week.
Amid the joy and success and the sheer sense of satisfied fulfilment engulfing Team Ireland in the village, Mageean was limping around, fighting a terrible battle she would lose.
She would have trudged home last in her heat had she lined up this morning, and there were fears she would not be able to finish at all. Those close to the situation say the injury is not a consequence of her focus on the Europeans in June, but the flaring up of a chronic problem at the wrong time.
And so the third and final heat of the women’s 1500m came and went this morning without Ciara Mageean.
“I only saw that last night,” said her 1500m rival and friend Laura Muir. “Bless her, it’s hard to get injured at any point, but right before the Olympics when she did so well at the Europeans. I wish her all the best and a speedy recovery.”
Even without the cast pall of Mageean’s injury, the good news for Ireland on the track today was hard to find. Neither Sophie O’Sullivan nor Sarah Healy qualified for the 1500m semi-finals, while Sharlene Mawdsley and Sophie Becker were both eliminated from the repechage of the 400m, where there is no third chance.
O’Sullivan’s was the best run, as she took nearly two seconds off her personal best only to suffer the near-miss of a seventh-placed finish, given the top six qualified for the next round. She probably would have made it, too, had she not been stalled in colliding with the Japanese runner Nozomi Tanaka.
“I tried to go round her and she didn’t want to let me past,” said O’Sullivan. “She was blocking I guess, it was just enough to throw me off and lose a bit of momentum. It wasn’t much but it was probably the second I needed.”
The big Irish disappointment of the morning was Sarah Healy, who ran out of steam in the final 50 metres of the second heat and was pipped on the line by New Zealand’s Maia Ramsden, finishing in 4:02.91.
She too has been condemned to the repechage, from which she still has the quality to progress. But this was undeniably disappointing, considering her form: she ran a new PB of 3:57.46 at the Paris Diamond League meeting only a month ago.
“I’m really disappointed,” she said. “I didn’t feel very good and then I tied up at the end which has now happened to me twice so I’m like, ‘What’s going on?’ It’s really hard. I came into this in such great shape and I should have been able to do that comfortably, and everything just felt really hard.
“Literally I just wasn’t feeling good at any stage. So I don’t know what happened today.
“I wasn’t feeling great, still felt like I could do it, until 200m to go, I can usually kick off this pace, but I just had nothing. It’s just disappointing with how I felt.
“Training has been going the best it’s ever gone, and obviously I’m in PB shape, so I don’t know yet.”
There was no good song to be sung from the 400m repechage either. Sharlene Mawdsley ran a new PB yesterday but finished nearly a half-second slower today, third in the first heat and then quickly ejected from the second of the two fastest losers’ spots.
“I’d have had to run a PB to have qualified and I did that yesterday, which was annoying”, she said.
“I think I ran everyone else’s race bar my own which is disappointing, but I’m not too disappointed. It’s the Olympic Games. I’m showing up when it counts. It’s OK.
“I think I’m losing out on training against the top girls in the last 60m of the race which is where I’m getting caught, I think my form is still the same but on the mental side of it I’m like, what do I do? I don’t know where to push or how to go to that next gear.”
Mawdsley is also battling an injury niggle in her knee, which stretches back to the start of the season.
“I was on the physio bed for two hours yesterday and it is mentally hard when you’re going out to the Olympic Games and not sure if your body is going to make it around that full 400m but it is the Olympics and I said, if I’m going to get injured, I may as well get injured here.”
Sophie Becker also bowed out, albeit in a faster time than yesterday’s, finishing second in her heat but not quickly enough to sneak into tomorrow’s semi-final.
Becker and Mawdsley will now re-adjust their focus to the women’s relay, the first round of which is on Friday. Rhasidat Adeleke will not be available for the opening round at least, and the Games’ fast times and the failure of the mixed relay team to progress to last Saturday’s final augurs poorly.
“Oh, God, it’s going to be tough,” said Becker. “We all have to go out and run a huge time but I am confident in the team.”
Becker began her interview by exhaling in a kind of disbelief. “What the hell,” she said, “the times that are needed to get into a semi-final!”
This track is fast, and the competition has peaked. Unfortunately for Ireland, too few of them have been able to meet the highest standard of competition they will face.
