Healy is taking it all in her stride as the competition heats up
PHIL HEALY is being pursued, and Ireland’s fastest woman is relishing the chase. She is the country’s form senior athlete, breaking the 200m national women’s record at the Cork City Sports this week in a time of 22.99 seconds.
This came less than six weeks after she sped through the 100m record, running 11.28 seconds to leave the 11.40 mark set by Ailish McSweeney in 2010 in tatters.
But in a storming summer for Irish athletics, Healy is merely part of the story.
Behind her, she can hear the footfalls of a junior cohort whose promise should thrill us. Last week, at the World Under 20 championships in Finland, the Irish women’s team won silver in the 4x100m relay.
Gina Akpe-Moses, Molly Scott, Ciara Neville and Patience Jumbo-Gula were the four involved. This time last year, Akpe-Moses became the first Irish athlete to win a European sprint title when winning the 100m at the European juniors in Italy.
At the European U18 championships earlier this month in Hungary, Rhasidat Adeleke, still just 15, won gold in the 200m.
The sprint talent assembling behind Healy is unprecedented in Irish athletics history (and beyond the power runners, Sarah Healy won gold in the 1500m and 3000m in Hungary, while Sophie O’Sullivan took silver in the 800m).
‘It’s absolutely super,’ says Healy with a grin. She is at the National Sports Campus in Dublin little more than 12 hours after her 200m record in Cork. There is a European Championships in Berlin next month to promote, and there is no more successful lure in Irish running than Healy – for now, that is.
The athletics world is small and intense – and it’s becoming fiercely competitive.
‘The junior squad were just off the national senior record in the 4x100m, and I was part of that 4x100m record that we set in Zurich (at the European Championships in 2014),’ says Healy. ‘It’s really exciting for the potential into Berlin.
‘And even in breaking the national record over the 100m and the 200m, you have the juniors running 11.5 and 11.6; they see that the national record is now 11.2, so it gets them to step it up. It’s a new target.
‘That’s a new focus. It’s constantly raising the bar and getting everyone else to meet that.’
In the form of her life, Healy attributes her astonishing summer to a move to Waterford. After four years studying in UCC, she moved to Waterford IT last September to start a two-year masters. But the academic benefits have been accompanied by a transformative sporting dividend. She can now train full-time under the tutelage of her coach Shane McCormack, who is based in the south-east. Prior to that, the pair trained together only occasionally, but distance coaching only took her so far. The potential of the 23 year old Cork native has been freed by immersion in McCormack’s methods.
And that decision to sacrifice her life in Cork for a move east could prefigure some of the decisions that will face Ireland’s junior talent in years to come.
Healy now understands the importance of making the correct choices.
‘It’s great for the juniors to have such great achievements, and we need the juniors to transfer into seniors as well, not just have the junior career but make it as a senior,’ she says.
‘You see a lot of stats floating around Twitter, that only 35 per cent go through to senior. That’s all about the coaching structure and coaches reaching out and seeing what works with other groups, and what doesn’t work.
‘The athletes as well have to realise that, yes, you run off natural talent to a certain point, and then it takes a lot of hard work, takes big calls.
‘It’s about choosing the right college, and not chasing the college just because of scholarships. Where are the coaches? What are the facilities?
‘Is America right for some people? It isn’t right for other people. It’s about looking at the whole picture and not jumping on a certain thing.’
She is due to run in a Diamond League meet in London today with some of the U20s as part of a 4x100m team. It is another appointment in a bustling summer. And that in itself is part of a wider schedule that has as its end-point the Tokyo Olympics, now little more than two years away. Athletes’ plans orbit the Olympics. The pull of the biggest sporting spectacle on earth is starting to exert itself. ‘It’s all about building year after year,’ she says, ‘what we do this year builds into next year and the year after that as well. ‘Next year, the main aim is to get the Olympic qualification standard out of the way. ‘If it counted this year, I already have the (necessary time for) 100m, the 200m and the 400m. ‘It’s about repeating the same thing, building year on year and hopefully achieving that Olympic standard. ‘But I also have the World Student Games (in Italy next July), European indoors (in Glasgow in March), and I have the world outdoors next year (in Qatar in September and October 2019). There are many major championships between now and Tokyo. ‘It’s about building blocks.’ And it’s about staying ahead of the competition, too. Healy can hear them coming – but they have to catch her.