{"id":36126,"date":"2025-09-22T09:44:08","date_gmt":"2025-09-22T09:44:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/36126\/"},"modified":"2025-09-22T09:44:08","modified_gmt":"2025-09-22T09:44:08","slug":"kate-oconnor-and-cian-mcphillips-begin-new-chapter-in-irish-athletics-history-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/36126\/","title":{"rendered":"Kate O\u2019Connor and Cian McPhillips begin new chapter in Irish athletics history \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

Even if there\u2019s no guarantee of a safe trajectory, the storied history of Irish athletics<\/a> has started a new chapter.<\/p>\n

The penultimate night of the World Athletics Championships<\/a> in Tokyo set the scene with two compelling characters. <\/p>\n

Firstly, with Kate O\u2019Connor<\/a> 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\u2019s only getting started.<\/p>\n

And secondly, with the clear and present prospect of Cian McPhillips<\/a> becoming the men\u2019s middle-distance global star the country has been craving for decades.<\/p>\n

Together they turned it into virtual dream-time when McPhillips ran himself into fourth place<\/a> in the final of the men\u2019s 800 metres, just over 70 minutes after O\u2019Connor 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. <\/p>\n

Both McPhillips and O\u2019Connor also knocked their own Irish records out of Japan\u2019s National Stadium. McPhillips broke the 800m record for the second time in 48 hours<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n

O\u2019Connor\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

[\u00a0Kate O\u2019Connor secures stunning silver while Cian McPhillips finishes fourth at World ChampionshipsOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

\"KateKate O’Connor: ‘Words can\u2019t describe how I feel.’ Photograph: INPHO\/ Morgan Treacy <\/p>\n

In between, she also injured her right knee in the long jump, which might well have unsettled a lesser athlete. O\u2019Connor\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s just insane, words can\u2019t describe how I feel, or the year that I\u2019ve had,\u201d said O\u2019Connor, the 24-year-old from Dundalk already enjoying two breakthrough indoor performances in the five-event pentathlon back in March \u2013 winning European Indoor bronze, then World Indoor silver.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve 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\u2019s one thing knowing that you\u2019re capable of it, it\u2019s another thing going and doing it.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019s defending champion Katarina Johnson-Thompson tied for third on 6,581, and there\u2019s no doubting O\u2019Connor was in the very best of them here, three-time Olympic champion Nafi Thiam from Belgium unable to start day two.<\/p>\n

O\u2019Connor was back at the National Stadium ahead of Sunday\u2019s 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\u2019s competitor in Maeve Kyle, also the country\u2019s first Olympic representative in athletics, who died last month at age 96.<\/p>\n

[\u00a0 Athletics In pictures: How Kate O\u2019Connor won a heptathlon silver medal at the World ChampionshipsOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

Kyle was a true trailblazer for Irish women in sport, O\u2019Connor 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 \u2013 and the first Irish athlete to win an outdoor multi-event medal.<\/p>\n

Starting with Eamonn Coghlan\u2019s gold in the 5,000m in the inaugural championships in Helsinki in 1983, Sonia O\u2019Sullivan 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\u2019Sullivan winning 20km silver in 2003, Olive Loughnane also winning 20km gold in 2009, before Rob Heffernan won the 50km gold in Moscow in 2013.<\/p>\n

\"Ireland’sIreland\u2019s Cian McPhillips on the finish line of the men’s 800m final in Tokyo. Photograph: INPHO\/ Morgan Treacy <\/p>\n

\u201cAnd I\u2019m so happy to win global medals, which hasn\u2019t been done in a long, long time,\u201c added O\u2019Connor. \u201cEspecially in multi-events, which hasn\u2019t been done before. It\u2019s a really special time. I\u2019m getting very used to winning medals and I don\u2019t really want to give that up. You can bet next year I\u2019ll be back and looking to win some more.\u201d <\/p>\n

There\u2019s no guarantee of any safe trajectory. Two years ago in Budapest, Ciara Mageean<\/a> and Rhasidat Adeleke<\/a> both finished fourth on successive nights \u2013 Mageean over 1,500m, then Adeleke over 400m.<\/p>\n

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\u2019d started treatment for cancer.<\/p>\n

O\u2019Connor and McPhillips are also astutely aware of how fickle progression can be. O\u2019Connor 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt wasn\u2019t far off a full Olympic final there, it took the three Olympic medal winners to beat me,\u201d McPhillips said of his race, where he moved from eighth to fourth down the homestretch. \u201cIt would have been nice to get a medal, but we\u2019ll leave that until next time.\u201d<\/p>\n

The new chapter is soon to be continued.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Even if there\u2019s no guarantee of a safe trajectory, the storied history of Irish athletics has started a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":36127,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[21345,61,60,14940,112,7194],"class_list":["post-36126","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-cian-mcphillips","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-kate-o-connor","tag-sports","tag-world-athletics-championships"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36126","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36126"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36126\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/36127"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36126"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36126"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36126"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}