O’Connor was favourite heading into the event after the late withdrawal of England’s Katarina Johnson-Thompson, who beat her to gold in 2022, and she certainly lived up to the billing.<\/p>\n
The Newry-born athlete led after the first two events on Tuesday. She ran the 100m hurdles in 13.54 seconds and produced a season’s best 1.82m in the high jump.<\/p>\n
In a rain-soaked evening session she dipped in the shot put, throwing just 12.85 in difficult conditions.<\/p>\n
While she said she was “gutted” with that performance, she rallied and she bounced back well to run the 200m in a season’s best time of 24.14, which was just 0.07 off her personal best as she strolled to victory in her heat.<\/p>\n
She earned 3,731 points across the four events to top the standings heading into Wednesday’s second day of the competition and, with a 49-point advantage over O’Dowda, looked to be in pole position for gold.<\/p>\n
O’Connor further increased that lead on Wednesday morning as she recorded a leap of 1.82m in the long jump and a season’s best 52.85m in the javelin to move 258 points ahead.<\/p>\n
In the 800m, she finished first as she ran 2:10.45 to take home NI’s first multi-class gold medal since Lady Mary Peters won the pentathlon in 1974.<\/p>\n
Her NI team-mate Anna McCauley finished eighth in the standings, despite being second-fastest in the 800m behind O’Connor.<\/p>\n
O’Connor will receive her gold medal on Thursday at 18:30 BST.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"O’Connor was favourite heading into the event after the late withdrawal of England’s Katarina Johnson-Thompson, who beat her…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":574847,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,60,43],"class_list":["post-574846","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ireland","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/574846","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=574846"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/574846\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/574847"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=574846"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=574846"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=574846"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}