‘I would love to have fulfilled my potential’
Injuries cost Emily Maher a shot at senior sprinting success, and the former World Youth champion has an important message for the next generation
TWENTY years on, the memories are still crystallised in perfect clarity for Emily Maher: that wondrous week in July 1998, those two gold medals in Moscow; 17 years old, the world of sprinting at her feet and still blissfully incubated from the challenges that lay ahead.
“Gosh, it feels like another life,” says Maher, now 37, as she casts her mind back. “But I remember it like yesterday. It was an amazing experience.”
Maher won the 100m and 200m at the inaugural World Youth Games in 1998, an achievement that echoed with an aftershock back home given Irish athletics was, at that time, a sport that overwhelmingly hinged its hopes on distance runners.
In Maher, however, it had unearthed a sprinting gem, one who appeared to have the talent and work ethic to reach the highest levels.
Given the fact her name doesn’t resonate today with the familiarity of a Sonia, Derval or Catherina, you might know the ending already, if not quite the chain of events that led us there.
At 19, Maher ran 11.58 for 100m and 23.34 for 200m, but eight years later she walked away from the sport with a 100m best of 11.56, an improvement of just 0.02 for all her years of sweat and struggle. She never ran faster over 200m.
After walking away, it took the best part of a year for her to feel OK about how things turned out.
“I was very bitter that I could never fulfil my full potential,” she says. “But there are very few athletes that can because time does catch up on you.
“I would love to have fulfilled my potential, I don’t think I ever did, but who does, really? Everybody thinks they can go that little bit further.”
Setbacks – if there was one reason for her not setting the world alight as a senior, it was them.
LACED
As a teenager things had come easily, but Maher’s early 20s were laced with potholes that brought her career to a grinding halt.
It hadn’t been for want of trying. Even at school Maher had placed athletics as her top priority, joining a professional training set-up in fifth year and travelling to and from Cardiff to be coached by Linford Christie, the 1992 Olympic 100m champion.
After her Leaving Cert she moved to Cardiff full-time, though her home always depended on the time of year and each training camp: Lanzarote in January and February, Australia March to May, Martinique in June.
It’s often said teenage success places a crippling burden on young shoulders, but for Maher the only expectation ever came from within.
“It was pressure I’d have put myself under, that was my downfall as well. When you feel the niggles you always push through as opposed to listening to your body and stopping.”
She ran in the Sydney Olympics at 19 on the Irish 4x400m team, but while she made a European and World Indoor Championships in the years after, Maher never qualified as an individual for a global senior outdoor championship.
In 2006 she was all set to compete at the Europeans in Gothenburg when she hit her lowest ebb.
“I had been training so well that year, I was in the shape of my life,” she says.
“But then I was doing baton practice and reaching back for the baton when I tore a muscle, my hip f lexor.”
She rested for a week and thought it’d be OK, but when she took to the warm-up track in Gothenburg she couldn’t even jog.
“This was the ultimate, the straw that broke the camel’s back,” she says. “At that stage I’d had enough of it.”
And yet she came back for more. The following year Irish team manager Patsy McGonagle arranged for her to be coached by Stephen Maguire, and Maher moved to Donegal and gave it another shot, winning the 2007 Irish 100m title ahead of Derval O’Rourke.
However, the good times didn’t last.
“I was getting tired of putting my heart into it and then getting injured. I’d lost the passion for athletics and when that’s gone, it’s all downhill from there. You have to have the passion.”
By then she had met her husband, Federico Quaglia, a professional rugby player from Argentina, and the couple moved back there to start a new life and a family, only recently returning to Kilkenny after almost eight years in Rosario.
They have a nine-year-old son Matias and a five-year-old daughter, Isabella. And it was with her son in mind that Maher managed to pull on her racing spikes in 2011 to finish fourth in the Argentinian national championships over 100m.
“I really wanted him to watch me run,” she says. “He is already massively into athletics and loves Isabella will start when she’s old enough as well.”
Last year, when Isabella turned four, Maher got back training briefly with the same idea in mind, only to soon think better of it.
“I went back training and it. everything hurt so I was like, ‘she can watch a video’,” she says with a laugh.
These days, her competitive instincts are sated in a challenging career as an international relationships manager with TransferMate Global Payments, a foreign currency specialist.
As far removed as she is from athletics, she was watching closely in recent weeks as a horde of Irish athletes won medals – just like her – at underage championships, and if Maher has one message for them it’s to think long-term.
“Keep a strong head on your shoulders, listen to your body and listen to your coach – the rest days are just as important as the training days,” she says.
PREPARE
“The most important piece of advice I’d give is to prepare for your life after athletics. We’ve lost quite a few athletes to mental health disorders because they’ve always identified as being a runner.
“My whole life, I was known as the runner, but I was lucky that I always said ‘no, I’m Emily, I run, but I’m not the runner’. But these girls coming up, they seem like they have such strong heads on their shoulders so I wouldn’t be worried.
“They just need to remember that one day they won’t be running around the track. There is a life after athletics and that’s very important.”