Olympic heartbreak has made Sharlene Mawdsley stronger

“I didn’t have a sports psychologist and once I started going to one, things really started to look up."

Sharlene Mawdsley (Newport A.C) celebrates winning the Women’s 200m final at the 2022 Irish Life Health National Indoor Championships,

When it comes to sports psychology, there are some things you can’t glean from a book. Like learning to ride a bike, some things just need to be experienced, the falls endured, before the penny finally drops.

Heading into 2021, Sharlene Mawdsley knew all the shtick about trusting the process, staying in the moment, but she never really understood how her mind worked until an Olympics hung in the balance, a fraction of a second separating utter elation from a feeling – however misguided – of abject failure.

In May last year, the Tipperary sprinter had a superb run at the World Relays in Poland, her 51.86-second leg helping the Irish mixed 4x400m team into the final and thereby securing Olympic qualification. But the only guarantee was that an Irish squad of three men and three women would be going to Tokyo. No one said she would be on it.

The final selection would be made after the nationals in June and, by then, Mawdsley was the fourth quickest Irishwoman via her season’s best of 53.21. The pressure of finding a faster race, and that key showdown at nationals, weighed on her for weeks, her mind a raging storm of self-doubt.

“There was an awful lot of pressure and I was having these mental blocks: ‘I can’t run sub-53,’” she says. “I was going to tracks thinking, ‘this isn’t a Mondo (surface), I’m not going to run quick here.’” 

Her coach, Gary Ryan, tried to get her in the right headspace but, says Mawdsley, he was seeing “the train leave the station and didn’t know how to stop it.” 

In the national 400m final, Mawdsley was in contention for second through the first 300 metres, but then pulled up suddenly and stepped off the track. Despite her heroics at the World Relays, she knew what that meant: she wasn’t going to Tokyo.

“I was obviously devastated,” she says. “After the highs of World Relays, you let yourself get away with the emotion of it all. I came back and was doing interviews, but I should have put my head down and declined them.

“I didn’t have a sports psychologist (early last year) and once I started going to one, things really started to look up. But at nationals we were trying to fix an awful lot of things for me mentally, and it was just too much, too soon.” 

She watched the Olympics at home in Newport, rising in the early hours with her mother, who she describes as the sport’s “number one fan.” 

It was hard to sit there, but watch it she did, with the Irish mixed relay turning in an excellent showing to reach the final and finish eighth.

“I love the sport and it was devastating that I wasn’t there, but I learned a lot from it,” she says. “It definitely made me a stronger person.” 

Sometimes you can simply care too much, think too much. Mawdsley learned that last summer, the proof arriving when she went to a race in Belgium shortly before the Olympics began, settling into her blocks utterly unburdened by expectation.

“I was like, ‘it doesn’t matter what happens,’” she says. “No one else really cares.” 

And just like that, she had the best run of her life, smashing her PB to clock 51.70. “It was like I won the lotto,” she says. “I was after proving what I can do. It meant the world to me.” 

This time last year, Mawdsley had a slew of set targets, the ambition and specificity of them hanging over her in tyrannical fashion all season. This year, her goals are not about times or places.

“All I want to do is get mentally stronger, that’s the main thing,” she says. “I’ve already taken a massive leap to that.” 

An injury to her navicular bone and a Christmas bout of Covid meant her winter training was hampered for several weeks, and so Mawdsley opted for the 200m at the National Indoors last month, winning in 24.05. Aware that a women’s relay team might go to World Indoors, she found a 400m race a week later, guesting at the Northern Irish Championships in Athlone.

Again, she went to the line without a fixed target, and “never enjoyed a race as much”, clocking an indoor PB of 52.74. That secured her spot on the Irish women’s 4x400m team for World Indoors, which begin tomorrow in Belgrade, with the relay heats on Sunday morning.

As tough as last year was, it has taught Mawdsley, now 23, things that many athletes only discover much later in their careers. She knows she has time to come again, at the Paris Olympics and far beyond. She knows things will be different when she stares down a similar high-level stress.

“I won’t let it slip away from me,” she says. “I’ll grasp every opportunity with both hands.”