SPRINTING COACH GARY Ryan doesn’t quite know why his name was recommended to Sharlene Mawdsley.
It was 2018 and Mawdsley was reaching a pivotal moment in her athletics career. She hadn’t raced competitively in a year. Injuries were persisting. Retirement was a temptation as the liberating phase of college life began to take hold of the Tipperary runner.
Mawdsley was attending a music festival when Roddy Gaynor, a coach based in Sligo, sent her a message, willing her to resume running. He suggested Ryan — another native of the Premier County who started out his athletics career in the same club as Mawdsley in Newport — as the coach that would put power in her spikes again.
A two-time Olympian in 1996 and 2000, and former director of coaching for Athletics Ireland, Ryan had lived the life that Mawdsley was embarking on.
“You’d have to ask Roddy that,” Ryan laughs down the phone as he explains the origins of his coaching partnership with Mawdsley.
Since Ryan took over, Mawdsley has switched from running in the 200m to becoming a 400m specialist in both the individual and relay classification. She’s a European champion, a European silver medalist, and in a few days, she will be a first-time Olympian with the possibility of contesting for a relay medal.
At the time she made contact, Ryan had been working as a sprint coach with the Tipperary hurlers. He was also training Niamh Whelan, a sprinter from Waterford, and decided to coach both runners together from the end of 2018.
“She had done really well as a junior and was really well coached,” says Ryan, referring to Hayley and Drew Harrison who previously took charge of Mawdsley’s training. Fr Bobby Fletcher coached her as a youngster at home in Newport.
Ryan’s first goal was to lift Mawdsley’s fitness levels and to scrub out her injuries. In order to do that, they had to move slowly and figure out the times when it was appropriate to push her and when it was time to relent and preserve her energy.
Throughout that process, Ryan advised her to switch from running over 400m to 200m. She had been prospering over the short distances having run on the Irish 4x100m relay team which finished fifth at the World U20 Championships in 2016. But it was a necessary move if Mawdsley wanted to realise the ambitions she had set for herself when she first met Ryan.
“She wanted to be world class and that’s where she would have to go,” Ryan explains about the discussions that led to her change in distances.
“She looked like someone who could achieve that. Some of the limitations on her at the time were that she really struggled with doing a lot of speed work when I first met her. That was one of the key things when I met her. She hadn’t done speed work in nearly two years.
“It seemed like a really good event for her to go with. With the 400, if you work really hard and you’re really diligent and brave, you can make a lot of progress with it. She was all of those things. It seemed like an event that would suit someone as technically good as she is. It’s a really coachable event.
“It was about getting faith in it over time. I think one of the qualities Sharlene has is bravery. Brave isn’t doing things that you think you’re able to do. Brave is being deadly scared of it and still doing it. That’s the quality you want.
“And the training for the 400m hurts.”
Mawdsley finished seventh at the European U23s at the end of that season. That was the first sign of progress following the transition. Ryan points to last year’s European Indoor championships, where she reached the 400m semi-finals, as a moment where she started to find her rhythm.
More recently, Mawdsley has become a dominant force in the relays, snapping necks with her split times. At the World Indoor Championships in March, she clocked the fastest 400m across both semi-finals in a scorching time of 50.48. Along with Phil Healy, Sophie Becker and Róisín Harrison, Mawdsley’s lap helped Ireland progress to the final in 3:28:45, cutting more than a second off the national record. They claimed fifth in the final, four seconds behind the Netherlands who won in 3:28.92.
She topped the split charts again in the semi-finals at the European Championships in Rome earlier this summer. She produced a searing run of 49.76 in the final leg. A superb silver medal was the outcome for Ireland, but Mawdsley did not stop breathing down the neck of the Dutch star Femke Bol — Olympic bronze medallist in the 400m hurdles — all the way down the home stretch of the final.
She also ran in the final of the 400m individual event at the Europeans, although she was disappointed with her eight-place finish, as her compatriot Rhasidat Adeleke took a silver medal. But the crowning moment for Mawdsley was the final of the mixed 4x400m relay. Again, she was the last one to receive the baton, and again, she turned up the thermostat with a 49.40 dash to deliver a gold medal for Ireland.
The medal, and new Irish record of 3:09.92, was a particularly rewarding night for Mawdsley after the scars she suffered before the Tokyo Olympics. Mawdsley was part of the quartet who sealed Olympic qualification for Ireland at the 2021 World Relay Championships in Poland. But she didn’t make it on to the plane to Japan as Cliodhna Manning took her place in the team after getting the better of her at the National Championships.
“I’m trying to wrench that from her mind,” says Ryan about his athlete’s despair at the time, and how he helped her navigate through the fog.
“It’s a trauma for anyone. You can imagine something that you’ve trained for your whole life, and you come so close, yeah, it was a really difficult time for her.”
He stressed the importance of grieving the loss of her place at the Olympics. But not for too long, of course. He had his own bank of disappointments from his running career to impart to her for perspective.
His prescription for the pain? Heal and grow by getting back into training.
“It was important for her to get back up on the horse. I remember the conversation I had with her was that she needed to grieve it but that I would be here Tuesday week to start training again. And that’s what happened. She actually ran a huge PB just before the Olympics which I think gave her a bit of confidence that actually, this is a temporary thing.”
That wasn’t the only time Mawdsley has been left hurting in this game. The World Indoor Championships this year left a scar too. She was the subject of a controversial disqualification in the semi-final heat of the individual 400m. After seemingly earning a place in the final by finishing third, she was ejected after an appeal by Austria’s Susanne Gogl-Walli who alleged that Mawdsley cut in illegally on the final turn. A counter-appeal from Athletics Ireland was unsuccessful.
Ryan, who was also at the event in Glasgow, says having the relay to lean into after that disappointment was the perfect tonic for her.
“I couldn’t understand how she was disqualified.
“So that added to it from her point of view, but the fact was that she had to get up the next day for the relay. You have other people relying on you and you just have to show up and do your job. She did that and I think it really helped. But the biggest thing about it was adding to the belief that could make finals. She’s of that class and she does belong in that company. And she execute when the pressure is on.”
Mawdsley is already in Paris preparing for the Olympics. Ryan will also be travelling to the French capital but, for now, he’s coaching her over the phone. What will constitute a good or bad Olympics for her won’t be determined by any goal-setting.
Athletes are always chasing a personal best in the individual event. That’s what Ryan wants for Mawdsley. The availability of Rhasdiat Adeleke will be an influential factor for the prospects of Ireland’s mixed and women’s relay teams.
“It’s a different dynamic if Rhasidat is in it and a different dynamic if she’s not,” says Ryan. “They’re certainly looking to be in the final and be competitive. If they have a chance to run for a medal, they’ll run for a medal.
“I haven’t said, ‘This is what will make it good.’ It’s a question of, ‘Can you go out and do the job that you have in you at the end of the day?’ I know that sounds really vague but it works. If you start on the things that will make you happy or sad, you generally underperform.
“You strip it down to, ‘This is what will put you in a position to get the best time.’”
Ryan passes through Newport every time he visits his mother in the town of Kilcommon where he grew up in Tipperary. Community means something to him, along with the pride of representing Tipperary on the world stage.
Not knowing why Mawdsley was directed his way when she was looking for a reboot in her athletics career doesn’t bother him; knowing that he’s teaming up with someone who took their first steps as a runner in the same place that he did means a lot to him.
“It makes it a little bit more special for me to be her coach. It means a lot to the people we live with and community is very important to me.”
