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Irish Independent
25-05-2025
- Sport
- Irish Independent
Athletics wrap: Efrem Gidey and Mark English claim big wins as Sharlene Mawdsley impresses
The 24-year-old made his decisive move with just over 600m to run and came home clear of his rivals, clocking 27:40:47. Silver went to Valentin Gondouin of France in 27:41.95, who edged Gidey to a bronze medal at the recent European Running Championships in Belgium, with France's Felix Bour third in 27:42:00. Gidey was born in Eritrea but fled the war-torn country in 2016, spending several months at a refugee camp in Calais before arriving in Ireland in March 2017, where he was soon linked up with Clonliffe Harriers, where coaches Joe Cooper and Peter McDermott developed his talent. He made his international debut for Ireland at the European Cross Country Championships in 2019, winning bronze in the U-20 race behind Norwegian star Jakob Ingebrigtsen. Since committing to full-time running over the past year, he has made considerable progress, breaking the Irish records at 10km and the half marathon on the road and over 10,000m on the track, clocking 27:26.95 in California in March. He is targeting the World Championships in Tokyo later this year but was narrowly outside the 27-man qualification quota prior to Saturday's race. Elsewhere, Mark English produced a hugely impressive win at the Sound Running Track Fest in Los Angeles on Saturday night, the five-time European medallist unleashing a devastating kick to win over 800m in 1:44.75, close to his Irish record of 1:44.53. 'I'm really happy with that, I felt really good on that last lap and it's a credit to the work I put in, that my coach put in,' said English, who's been training under Australian coach Justin Rinaldi this year. 'I'm really happy I was that strong for the last 200 metres as you need that strength at the world level. I'm just off a stint of altitude training and it reassures me that that training works, and it also reassures me my training group has been really beneficial.' Andrew Coscoran ran a personal best over 5000m at the same meeting of 13:11.05, which will move him inside the qualification cut-off for the World Championships, with Coscoran eyeing a double in Tokyo over 1500m and 5000m. Sharlene Mawdsley was in action in Zagreb and the Tipperary sprinter turned in a hugely impressive run, finishing second over 400m in 51.14 to take a big step forward from her run in Savona earlier in the week. Ava O'Connor won a silver medal in the 5000m at the NCAA Division IÍ Championships in Colorado, adding to her gold in the 3000m steeplechase, while there was a horde of Irish athletes in action at the IFAM meeting in Brussels on Saturday. The most impressive run came from Conor Kelly, the 17-year-old smashing Chris O'Donnell's Irish U-20 400m record of 46.54 and clocking 46.18 despite the wet conditions. Darragh McElhinney was the quickest of the Irish men in the 5000m, clocking 13:26.48, while Róisín Flanagan clocked a Northern Irish record in the women's 500m of 15:22.00, with Íde Nic Dhomhnaill also impressing with a PB of 15:36.68. Sophie Becker opened her individual season with a 51.69-second clocking for 400m. Nicola Tuthill finished fourth in the hammer throw in Halle, Germany, throwing a best of 69.68m. Meanwhile, Sarah Healy and Cathal Doyle will be in action at the Rabat Diamond League in Morocco this evening, with Doyle making his debut at this level in the 1500m at 7.54pm and Healy racing a strong field over 3000m at 8.07pm.
Irish Times
04-05-2025
- Sport
- Irish Times
Ian O'Riordan: Do we need to protect the limits of women's distance running?
These are refreshing and fast-changing times for women's sport, and one Irish athlete swiftly making a name for herself is Niamh Allen. Her outright victory in the Midleton five-mile road race in Cork on Thursday evening, beating all the women and men, was exceptional on several counts, possibly causing some confusion in the prize-giving ceremony afterwards. Allen has already been breaking boundaries in Irish women's distance running, ever since returning from two years in Australia last April. Just three months after giving birth to her first child, Lily, she finished second in the National Cross-Country Championships in November, with that winning her first big international vest. She followed that with a victory in the National 10km road race in March, her 31:44 the fastest Irish women's time recorded on Irish soil. Recently turned 30, Allen now runs with Leevale AC, and Thursday's Midleton race consisted largely of Cork runners, with the usual mixed-race start. In magnificent running conditions, over the latter stages, Allen broke clear of the field, winning by 22 seconds in 25:31, comfortably the best of the 340 finishers, 204 men, and 136 women. Leevale club-mate Michael Walsh was second in 25:53, thus the top men's finisher, ahead of another Leevale runner Donal Coakly, third in 26:24. READ MORE The second-best women's finisher was Siobhán Hoare from Togher, who ran 30:19, and even if Allen's overall victory among the women and men is only a tiny outlier, she is unquestionably an Irish athlete to watch over the next few years. Right now, it seems, there are no limits on her potential. European Cross Country Championships, Antalya, Turkey, December 2024: Niamh Allen in the women's senior race. Photograph: Morgan Treacy/Inpho While Allen's victory also pokes gentle fun at the idea of what women can achieve, it doesn't in any way alter the need, as I see it, to protect the entirely separate women's category. The English FA were the latest sporting body to address that this week, banning all transgender women from the women's game from the beginning of next month. This follows last month's UK supreme court ruling that the terms 'woman' and 'sex' in the Equality Act refer only to a biological woman and to biological sex. World Athletics has made its stance clear, and other sporting bodies have followed. It also comes at a time when the marketing people at Nike have dreamed up another idea to test the limits of distance running, this time focusing on the women's mile world record. Inspired in part by a study published in the journal Royal Society Open Science in February, which suggested Faith Kipyegon from Kenya could feasibly run a 3:59.37 mile as soon as this summer, they've set up the sub-four record attempt at the Stade Charléty in Paris on June 26th. This will also mean improving Kipyegon's world record of 4:07.64, set in 2023, a time no other woman has come within almost five seconds of, but this won't be your normal, or indeed legal, record attempt. Kipyegon will benefit from reduced aerodynamic drag on the track thanks to improved drafting off male pacemakers, who will be substituted at the halfway point, and will also be racing in whatever new Nike super-spike is being worked on behind closed doors, and therefore not yet legal either. We all appreciate that Kipyegon is arguably the best women's middle-distance runner of all time, certainly the best I've seen. She's the three-time Olympic 1,500m champion, unbeaten at the distance in four years, and at age 31, and mother to a six-year-old daughter, is showing no signs of slowing down. It took 34 years of small steps for the women's mile time to improve by almost eight seconds, to that 4:07.64, and now Faith Kipyegon hopes to do the same in one giant leap. Photograph: Getty Images In the first Diamond League meeting of the season in Xiamen, China last Saturday, she opened with a 1,000m race, clocking a terrific 2:29.21 – just missing the world record of 2:28.98 set by Russia's Svetlana Masterkova back in 1996. If Kipyegon could somehow have managed to keep going at that 2:29.21 pace for another 609m (to complete the mile distance) she'd have clocked a 4:00.08 mile, still just short of sub-four. But it simply does not work that way: in reality, Kipyegon will need to improve by two seconds per lap, or almost eight seconds overall, compared with the 4:07.64 mile she ran in Monaco in July 2023. It took 34 years of small steps for the women's mile time to improve by almost eight seconds, to that 4:07.64, and now Kipyegon hopes to do the same in one giant leap. In that same race in Monaco, incidentally, Ciara Mageean broke the Irish women's mile record when running 4:14.58 – the previous mark of 4:17.26 had stood to Sonia O'Sullivan since 1994. Nike are calling it Breaking4, a sort of sequel to their Breaking2 project, which in 2019 enabled another Kenyan, Eliud Kipchoge, to eclipse the two-hour barrier in the men's marathon, running 1:59:40 – only again that didn't count for record purposes due to the rotation of pacemakers and other such gimmicks. In a publicity statement for Breaking4, Nike said: 'How do you make the impossible possible? You start by calling your moon shot, and as moonshots go, Faith Kipyegon's is as audacious as they come.' For Kipyegon, the mile-record attempt is also about inspiring women runners everywhere: 'I want this attempt to say to women, 'you can dream and make your dreams valid',' she said. 'This is the way to go as women, to push boundaries and dream big.' It's coming up on 71 years since Roger Bannister became the first man to run a sub-four-minute mile, his 3:59.4, on May 6th, 1954, also considered by many to be an impossible task at the time. Once that barrier was broken, many more soon followed. Or as Bannister said, 'Après moi, le déluge.' Perhaps that's part of Nike's thinking: that if the men have been doing it for more than 70 years, why not the women now, too? But the sub-four mile is one of the last great frontiers of women's running for good reason, and it would be silly and even reckless to suggest it can be broken anytime soon, if at all. All such records should only be allowed to progress organically, albeit with whatever technological advances are permitted. Otherwise, the boundaries will be pushed beyond what can be achieved under normal circumstances. And what might that encourage, more athletes resorting to doping perhaps? Sometimes these limits, as with women's sport, need careful protection.
Telegraph
06-03-2025
- Sport
- Telegraph
Meet the Greta Thunberg of UK Athletics – who attends Extinction Rebellion rallies
When Innes FitzGerald emerged two winters ago as the outstanding young British distance runner of her generation, it was not long before she became even more widely known as the 'Greta Thunberg of sport'. She had performed magnificently to finish fourth in the Under-20 European Cross Country Championships in Italy – aged just 16 – following a 20-hour coach and train journey from Devon to Turin that involved even cycling across Paris on a fold-up bike to make a rail connection. She then promptly turned down the chance to travel to Australia for the 2023 World Cross Country Championships. 'I would never be comfortable flying in the knowledge that people could be losing their livelihoods, homes and loves ones as a result,' she wrote in an open to British Athletics. Innes FitzGerald enjoys a runaway victory in the U20/17 women's race at the Cardiff Cross Challenge. — AW (@AthleticsWeekly) November 9, 2024 FitzGerald would then follow up winning the London Mini Marathon by joining Extinction Rebellion activists who had gathered in Parliament Square. Now 18, the environmental campaigning continues – and her running has gone from strength to strength – but the realities of pursuing her athletics dream has also prompted some deeply uncomfortable choices. She will make her senior international debut at the European Indoor Championship in Apeldoorn in the Netherlands this week, where she has travelled with the rest of a near 50-strong British team by air. 'Unfortunately, this time, I haven't managed to sort it out logistically – it's been quite complicated,' she explains. 'I've been very busy with uni stuff and other different family issues. I do feel like I should be getting the train there, and that's definitely something I'm going to be doing in the future. 'For me, it's quite gutting that the whole team aren't going together on the train, considering it's so close and so easy to do. Even though I might be doing the wrong thing, just still saying that it's wrong is better than just doing it and not saying it's wrong. 'Whenever I'm getting on a flight, it's never easy. I'm always thinking, 'Oh, I shouldn't be doing this', but I know that I've got to go to these championships to fill my dreams as a professional athlete. So it's just about balancing that and trying to do as much as I can in other areas of my life to try and make up for it, and also just speak out.' A winner of the BBC Green Sport Award in 2023, FitzGerald is flattered by the Thunberg comparison. 'I think Greta is very inspirational,' she says. 'She kind of managed to mobilise so many young people. I think it's a compliment to be associated with her. If I can do anything near to what she's done, then I'll be very happy. I strongly believe that we, as athletes, have a responsibility.' After growing up on a farm in Devon, FitzGerald's interest in climate change stemmed from her father and she now tries to make environmentally friendly changes in her life and will look into how she can carbon offset in the future. She has also been talking with a sports-focused group called Champions for Earth, which is trying to organise mass participation running events with a low carbon footprint. 'I feel like I have a responsibility to look after the people who are in the Global South, or directly affected by extreme weather events,' she says. 'We're not, in the UK, affected by it, but I feel the pain they're feeling, and I feel like it's my responsibility in a more privileged position to help them, and raise awareness for the situations they're in as a result of our actions.' Since her running breakthrough two years ago, FitzGerald has dominated the European Under-20 Cross Country Championships with back-to-back wins. She then set a European indoor 3,000 metres age-group record of 8min 40.05sec earlier this year. Her strength and bold front-running style has prompted comparison with Paula Radcliffe. She got into running as part of her sister's Duke of Edinburgh award and then built up to five 20-minute runs a week during the Covid lockdown. FitzGerald was soon then breaking 18 minutes at her local Seaton Parkrun before persuading her dad to start taking her training at Exeter Harriers, where she has since been mentored by Gavin Pavey and his wife Jo, a former European 10,000m champion and the only British athlete to have competed at five Olympic Games. After completing A-Levels last year in biology, physics and maths, FitzGerald is now studying for a degree in sport and exercise science at the University of Exeter. 'I don't like bigging people up too much, but Innes is very good,' says Gavin Pavey. 'We never know what's going to happen in the future, but it looks promising. She's doing things that other young athletes at this stage haven't done. What's good about what we're doing is her [weekly mileage] volumes aren't very high.' FitzGerald is also emphasising a long-term approach. 'I never really thought I'd have this opportunity – I don't think there's too much pressure on me,' she says. 'I just want to go out there, enjoy it, soak it all up, and hopefully get into that final. That's where I believe I belong. Hopefully compete for one of those medals, but just getting close. There's lots more years of my career left. I don't want to jump into anything too soon, because I'll have nowhere to progress to. It's just about building up that mileage and intensity gradually.'
BBC News
14-02-2025
- Sport
- BBC News
Griggs missing indoor season after freak injury
Tyrone athlete Nick Griggs' conspicuous absence from the current indoor season is because of a freak knee injury that has required twice daily doses of intravenous antibiotics during a two-week hospital 20-year-old is scheduled to leave Musgrave Park Hospital on Friday. His knee trouble began when he was knocked to the ground while waiting at a congested startline before the Under-23 race at the European Cross Country Championships in Antalya on 8 immediately got up and went on to finish a brilliant second as he clinched a third successive individual medal at the European Cross Country after the race, the Ireland athlete began to experience pain in his knee and while he attempted to combine training with medical assessments and treatment over the next couple of weeks, he had to stop running a couple of days after Christmas and hasn't run since then."He obviously just ran on adrenaline in Antalya and ran brilliantly," Griggs' coach Mark Kirk told BBC Sport NI. "But after a series of scans and various appointments, it was eventually determined that he had essentially an infected kneecap. The medical condition is called Osteomyelitis and it can be very serious."The pain got to the extent that he couldn't drive to get a scan at one point and he was struggling walking up the stairs or even walking." Griggs back on an exercise bike With oral antibiotics and painkillers not improving Griggs' situation, a decision was taken just over two weeks ago that he would be admitted to Musgrave Park Hospital."Thankfully, the intravenous antibiotics have finally led to an improvement and Nick was able to sit on an exercise bike for a couple of 20 to 25-minute cycles this week, which was the first exercise he had done in six weeks," added outstanding form last summer when he clocked huge 3,000m and 5,000m personal bests and also bettered his 1500m time, led to him earning spots at the two premier US indoor meetings, the New Balance Games and the Millrose Games, but getting well again instead became his priority. "Nick is making good progress now but he's going to have to continue getting oral antibiotics for another four weeks so we're just going to have to see how things go."Joining our group of athletes for a training camp in the French Pyrenees in April is probably a target for him but we're just going to have to see how it pans out."
