Gavin Cooney reports from Paris

LATER TODAY, PHIL Healy will take a baton and run a 400m leg for Ireland in an Olympic final. 

But let’s rewind first. Just over a year ago, Healy approached the relay team manager, David McCarthy. 

“‘Look Dave,” she told him, “I couldn’t think of anything worse than train for another four weeks for the world championships.” 

Healy had hit what she needed to become a career nadir, and so had to defy his wishes to keep training with the squad. 

“He asked me to be part of the team and I literally said I didn’t have anything to offer the girls,” Healy told The 42 in an interview conducted shortly before she departed for Paris. 

Healy’s concerns were not limited to the relay team: she was considering quitting the sport entirely. Healy has been ultra-consistent high-achiever in Irish athletics for years. She broke the Irish 100m and 200m records and ran in at least one major championship every year from 2013, finishing fourth at the 2021 European indoors. In Tokyo, Healy became the first female Irish athlete to compete in three different events, running the 200m and 400m before helping the mixed 4x400m relay team into the final, where they finished eighth. 

But her trajectory plunged after Tokyo, and the bottom was found at last year’s national championships, where she finished fourth in the 400m, three seconds off her best time. It was the moment where months of problems coalesced. The good news was found in the fact things went so badly: had she finished only a second or so from her PB, the drift may have continued. 

“It takes a massive toll on your body, to compete internationally for 10 years without a break,” she says. “I had lost the love of the sport. Training became a chore, but I still did it because it was my routine. I needed that nationals race to be so bad to make me stop and not continue on.” 

Healy wept that night and came to the verge of quitting the sport entirely. She had started full-time work as a software engineer, and so she was already rehearsing the lines of her second act in life. Perhaps now was the time to pull up the curtain. 

“That was the point that made me think, ‘Can I actually continue in this sport?’ It had been two tough years and I didn’t know, ‘Am I going to have the good days again?’ ‘Are the good days gone?’

So she called McCarthy to quit the relay team and pull out of contention for the world championships in Budapest. But before making the ultimate call on her career, she cut her season short and looked a little deeper. She downed tools for four weeks and discovered that many of her problems were caused by illness. Healy was suffering from Hashimoto’s disease, which was causing her thyroid to be irregular. It is now managed with medication. 

Towards the end of her break, the relay team on which she could have been a part went and qualified for the final at the world championships. Healy returned to training the day after their final, which, she says, just so happened to be the day her four-week break elapsed. 

She decided to give it one last shot solely because of the numbers on the calendar. 

“With Paris being only one year more, I could give it one more shot,” she says. “If Paris was three or four years out, it would have been a very different decision. That was the main goal. It was an exciting time for relay, we know we have a great squad. Going for relay qualification was the main aim. Paris kept me in the sport.” 

Healy made a few changes to her routine, training less often at her Waterford base and more often closer to home in Cork. She had a few new training partners on the track and in the gym. And suddenly she felt fresh again. 

“When I came back training everything became so much easier,” she says. “I was shocked. I was thinking, ‘I should be unfit here, I should be struggling.’ But mentally I had put myself in such a big hole by constantly looking for something, looking for signs in training, that I had chronically stressed myself all the time.

“I just needed that mental break to reset, and once I was in the swing of training I could see the signs very quickly. There is no fooling me. If I know something isn’t good enough, I know. When we came to indoor season, I was nervous. ‘Am I able to do this again? Am I able to make it all the way round for 400? Can I compete at this level again?’

“So there were nerves at the start of the season but when you get into the swing of things you forget the bad days very quickly.

“I was starting much earlier which gave me a much bigger window to allow me chip away at things slowly without that pressure of starting later in the winter.”

Healy’s form was such that she was picked to go to the world relay championships in the Bahamas at the start of May, and she, Sophie Becker, Sharlene Mawdsley, and Rhasidat Adeleke booked a spot at the Olympics on the opening day. 

“Qualifying for Paris at world relays made me realise I have gone through such a hard time, and not many people have seen it and knew the ins and outs of it,” she says. “If you look at the whole year, I’d say I cried at 70% of sessions. It was a dark, dark time. But I got to enjoy the sport again, I had much better balance.” 

She was agonisingly close, too, to qualifying for an individual spot in Paris, missing out by two places, partly as a result of organisers decision to cut the number of spots from 56 to 48. 

Phil Healy with Kelly McGrory after qualifying for today's final. Morgan Treacy / INPHO Morgan Treacy / INPHO / INPHO

Involvement in the relay, however, is a stunning outcome from the depths of last year. Though she left the team, she didn’t cut all ties: she wasn’t one to leave the WhatsApp group. 

“Oh absolutely not, I was in contact all the time,” she says. “I was the person sitting at home, I was talking to them right up to the event and after. We are a great group of girls, they fully supported me.

“I was at peace with it as I was in such bad shape. To see the girls get to a world final was phenomenal. To see them be so close to the national record, I was like a proud mam at home watching!

“It’s our spot one minute but there’s someone right behind us fighting for our spot, so it’s up to us to earn it.” 

This is the interesting dynamic: how have Ireland created such a culture of support and unity in a team where positions are so brutally fought over? 

“It’s a credit to David McCarthy for creating such a great dynamic within the women’s 4x400m squad as that’s all I can speak of,” says Healy, “but when we mix with the men’s, there is an unbelievable environment and buzz.

“We love a few ice breakers and team building games. They are usually for his kids! There’s silly scribbler. You put on these glasses, it’s like pictionary with a card. You’re in twos and the pen is on your nose and you have to draw on this screen. I am chronic.” 

Another Olympic final later today is another laurel for Healy’s CV, but perhaps the best of achievement of all was sequestered away before ever she set foot in Paris. 

“Getting messages from people saying, ‘You have been such an inspiration, such a role model for younger kids and sticking with it.’ People who have followed my career for years, they have said, ‘Thanks for your service.’

“When you realise the effect you have had on people, and see those messages… as athletes you’re constantly moving from one thing to the next that you don’t stop and realise the impact you’ve had on people.

“People are so invested in your career, you don’t realise it. They are on your journey with you too. Sometimes you feel very alone, but these people are backing you.”