Sarah Lavin aiming for nothing less than podium place in Europeans
Ireland’s Sarah Lavin during her semi-final at the 2022 European Athletics Championships. Picture: ©INPHO/Morgan Treacy
Sarah Lavin still gets a kick out of the last European Championships. It’s not just that she set a new personal best (since beaten) with a 12.79 and finished fifth in the 100m hurdles. It was the efforts of others like Ciara Mageean, Rhasidat Adeleke and Israel Olatunde who set the tone for Ireland in Munich in 2022 long before she hit the track.
Her first Europeans were already eight years in the rear window and Lavin felt Irish athletics was finding a whole new plain as she watched her teammates take on the continent’s best at the Olympiastadion. Now, with the hurdles scheduled much earlier at next week’s Europeans in Rome, she is hoping to get Ireland up and running and go even further herself.
“I remember thinking, 'gosh, I'm fifth in Europe, that's really good', but I didn't go in ranked anywhere near fifth and I PBd that evening to make the final. So I was very appreciative of where I came in. I felt like that was a very good performance for me, but obviously to come close to a medal… Fifth isn't third and the top three is where you want to be.
“Would I be as happy with it this time around? No, and that's the bottom line. I'm a very different athlete than I was two years ago. Since then I was seventh at world indoors, I was fifth at world indoors and obviously won the European Games [bronze] medal last year, which was a time trial effectively but, yeah, I think I know where I'm at.”
Lavin describes herself as a championship performer and you couldn’t argue.
She approaches the championships in Italy’s capital in eye-catching form. Her season-opening outdoor run in Doha earlier this month was a 12.73. That’s 0.06 better than the time she hit in Munich in the semi-final, and only 0.11 off her PB and the Irish record set at the Worlds in Budapest last August.
It’s also under the Olympic qualifying time and that speaks for an athlete who, having just turned 30 on Tuesday, is getting better and better and building all the time on the sort of impressive and consistent running that has been a trademark in recent seasons. It’s no wonder she is targeting a medal in Rome.
Managing that would be sensational.
The 100m hurdles is a stacked field, even without the Americans or Caribbeans. Europeans have won the last two Diamond League races. Cyréna Samba-Mayela of France in Oregon last week and Switzerland’s Ditaji Kambundji in Doha. Poland’s Pia Skrzyszowska came third that latter evening, two places and 0.20 seconds ahead of Lavin.
Nadine Visser of the Netherlands is another one to watch in Rome and, given the times needed to get on the podium in those meets so far this year, it was no surprise to hear Lavin predict that she will need to beat her standing national record of 12.62 and dip into the 12.50s if she is to achieve that ambition.
“Ultimately, that is what you want to do but doing things is very, very different. You need those moments where absolutely everything goes right and you have absolute precision. I’ve been following what Noelle [Morrissey, her coach] has been saying up to now.
“That’s what you do as an athlete. You’re just the horse effectively, she’s the trainer. I’ll just be doing everything possible I can for the next 10 days, holding up the head and mental strength because when you get to this level, mental fortitude is a lot of it.”
That decade spent in the call room at major events will stand to her. She showed yet again in Glasgow earlier this year how adept she is at peaking at the right moment by clocking a personal best of 7.90 in the 60m hurdles semi-final and then almost matching it when finishing fifth in the final.
Her current ranking will excuse her from the heats in Rome and the hurdle schedule there and in Paris – the first early in the meet, the latter near the end – will allow her maximum time in between to prep for the Olympics. Races still have to be run but there is a sense with Lavin of an athlete who will be perfectly poised on the start lines.
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