Women's 4x400 an outside medal shot as Adeleke enters fray

The Irish team is drawn in lane four, the same lane Rhasidat Adeleke had last night, and it’s expected Adeleke will be added to the team that yesterday finished a fine third in their heat.

Sat, 10 Aug, 2024 - 07:37

Cathal Dennehy

This will be a hell of a way to finish: four frantic laps of the Stade de France, a fitting finale to a captivating week of athletics.

Tonight’s women’s 4x400m final, at 8.14pm Irish time, will be the last event of the Olympic track and field programme, and the fact there’s not only an Irish team participating, but potentially contending for a medal, speaks volumes about the growing strength in the sport in Ireland – and what a special generation of 400m runners are currently in the ranks.

The Irish team is drawn in lane four, the same lane Rhasidat Adeleke had last night, and it’s expected Adeleke will be added to the team that yesterday finished a fine third in their heat.

It was a performance of poise, pace and pure guile from the Irish quartet of Sophie Becker, Phil Healy, Kelly McGrory and Sharlene Mawdsley, clocking 3:25.05 behind Jamaica (3:24.92) and the Netherlands (3:25.03).

If all is well with Adeleke after her exertions last night and she’s drafted in, we can expect a three-to-four second difference to their time.

Given history has shown it takes 3:20-3:21 to reach a podium at this level, they’ll need her firing at full capacity to land a historic medal.

However, it’s an outside shot, with USA, the Netherlands, Great Britain and Jamaica all set to be at full strength and to most objective observers, they appear stronger.

But this is a relay, and strange things happen in relays, the key so often being to get the baton to your anchor in the right place and let her do the rest.

Time and again, Sharlene Mawdsley has shown herself to be a lethal weapon in that position, and she was that again yesterday, splitting 49.65 to bring Ireland from fourth to third and into an automatic qualifying position.

She felt she had more in the tank.

“We'll go back and recharge, regroup and we'll see what the plan is,” she said. “We're all guns blazing, we're ready to go.”

Becker got them off to a brilliant start with an opening leg of 50.90 and if she can repeat that, and hand off to Adeleke in contention, Ireland will likely have at least a sight on the medals when Mawdsley sets off on anchor.

Positioning will be vital at that point, given she’ll be up against a slew of individual finalists, but she’s proven herself capable of mixing it with them.

Elsewhere yesterday, Kate O’Connor closed out her Olympic debut with a fine 14th-place finish in the heptathlon, the Dundalk athlete racking up a total of 6167 points across the seven events. Belgium’s Nafi Thiam won her third straight Olympic title with a tally of 6880 ahead of Britain’s Katarina Johnson-Thompson (6844).

In the semi-finals of the men’s 800m, Mark English made a bold, brave bid to reach his first global final, the Donegal man surging into the lead with 200m to run and going for broke as he chased one of the two automatic qualifying spots.

He led around the final turn but was soon swallowed up by a horde of rivals, finishing a close sixth in 1:45.97.

“It's not the result I wanted, I wanted to get through, I went for the win but it just wasn't my day,” he said. “My approach was to use my superior 400m speed to get out over the first 200m. It possibly didn't help that I strained my abductor in the warm up as well but I don't want to use that as the excuse. I couldn't have given it any more.”

Sarah Lavin clocked 12.69 to finish sixth in her 100m hurdles semi-final, well shy of the top two places she needed to automatically advance.

She got off to a strong start, matching many of the world’s best to halfway but in the search for tiny fractions of a second, Lavin clattered a barrier with her trail leg.

“When you’re looking for a time you haven’t run before, you have to do things you’ve never done before so it’s going to feel different,” she said. “Up until the eighth hurdle, I did everything I could. I couldn’t have any regrets on that.”