Dream fulfilled, golden boy Jason Smyth retires

The man from Eglinton in Derry won 21 major championship medals across the Games, Worlds, Europeans and Indoors

Thu, 30 Mar, 2023 - 07:07

Athletics

When they look back at Jason Smyth’s career in the years to come there will be an understanding that nothing became the undefeated Paralympic phenomenon who announced his retirement yesterday so much as his leaving of it in Tokyo.

The man from Eglinton in Derry won 21 major championship medals across the Games, Worlds, Europeans and Indoors but the memory of his last race, when he edged Algeria’s Skander Djamil Athmani in the Japanese capital in 2021, will last longest.

For him, certainly.

Smyth was 33 and 15 years on the circuit when he rocked up on the back of a fragmented run-in after a winter of injury and the discontent that can bring with it for an athlete. For once he wasn’t favourite at the gun.

Under those circumstances, his performance was outstanding with Athmani beaten by the width of a hair. This was Rocky coming out of retirement and flooring the Russian. One in the eye for logic and a pop at Father Time.

So, yeah, Tokyo is his favourite.

“As an experience, London (2012), just the Games, the hype, the atmosphere, I was so close to home, family was there, friends were there, it was really a shift in Para sport. But as a race, and what personally meant the most, it was Tokyo, and that was all around the situation leading up to it: the injuries, doubting I was maybe done in my career, doubting I would even make it.

“Then you had new athletes who were running quicker than me. To pull it together in that moment under that pressure by a hundredth of a second… I had to go somewhere big, somewhere I had never gone to in my life. There was something incredible in that. I had won in London by a long way but I won in Tokyo by centimetres so that for me was incredible.”

No-one was to know then that this was the big finish in more ways than one. Smyth took time after Japan to decide on the next step. He had 21 gold medals in his pocket and a young family at home and he knew that the addition of one more ribbon wouldn’t do much to embellish his legacy. A silver, or worse though? Different story.

Smyth traversed 18 years unbeaten in Paralympic sport. Think about that. His career, most of it as a 100m runner and in the T13 classification, spanned three different decades, but he won a few in the T12 as well and eight of his haul came in the 200m. And no-one could touch him.

It’s that ability to go the entire distance unbeaten that makes him most proud.

“The reality is I feel that, for a lot of that time, I was ahead of the game and maybe I was part of pushing things forward. But, again, that was reflected in the choices I made, the people I had around me, going to the States (to train) just to push myself to the next level and I think that showed.”

Renowned as the fastest Paralympian on the planet, the man with less than 10% of his vision due to a condition known as Stargardt’s Disease left his mark beyond those parameters too. He won two national senior 100m titles and represented Ireland at two European Athletics Championships and a World Athletics Championships.

He was the first Paralympian to compete in both of those events and he ran for Northern Ireland at the 2014 Commonwealth Games. In 2012, he fell just 0.04 seconds short of an Olympic qualifying time. The only Irishmen to finish the 100m faster than him are Israel Olatunde and Paul Hession.

Smyth starts a new chapter from here on in as strategy manager with Paralympics Ireland and there are no conflicting thoughts on it. He got to go out on his own terms, in his own time, and he joins his old friend Michael McKillop in the ex-athletes club from here on in.

That’s 31 times the pair made the podium’s top step between them. Ireland, and maybe the Paralympics, may never see their like again. An era is over. “It certainly is,” said Smyth when reflecting on their successes. “And when you look back and you see the medals there… I don’t mean it in any bad way, but I just don’t think that is ever going to be replicated.”