Ciara Mageean experience can show Sarah Healy how to win mind games

After a fourth straight track championships where the 21-year-old underperformed, she could look to her room-mate for advice.

EXPERIENCE: Ireland's Sarah Healy after finishing 11th in her 1500m heat.

Standing in the dungeons beneath Munich’s Olympic Stadium, listening to Sarah Healy explain with raw, unfiltered, ruthless self-criticism how her mind had sabotaged her performance, how she “just decided to check out” at the key point of her 1500m heat, I thought back to a conversation from 2014.

It was in New York, and I was sitting with Bob Larsen, a hall-of-fame US coach who guided Meb Keflezighi to an Olympic marathon medal alongside victories in the Boston and New York City Marathons – alongside many other achievements across six decades of coaching.