Ciara Mageean still grieving for lost dream but fire in the belly for LA

Four months on from Olympic heartbreak, the Portaferry woman's pain remains raw.

Thu, 21 Nov, 2024 - 06:00

Brendan O'Brien

For nearly 20 minutes the words spill from Ciara Mageean’s lips, more or less uninterrupted, before the annual Athletics Ireland awards. No less than 2,745 of them. She is asked just three short, simple questions in all that time. This is supposed to be a group interview. It isn’t that. It’s an emotional outpouring. A flushing of her soul.

Another one.

Mageean had spoken on a handful of occasions in the months after an Achilles injury robbed her of the chance to follow up her gold medal performance at May’s European Championships with a shot at more history in Paris at the Olympic Games. Each interview had been raw, infused with hurt as she careered from greatest high to most devastating low.

“I felt like I was drowning,” she said at one point. “That it was just a void.”

Four months on from that heartbreak and the voice still cracks as the Portaferry woman recaps her first injury torment a dozen years ago, the 20% chance that surgery wouldn’t fix it then, how she had been managing an ankle problem for eight years before 2024, and the cortisone injections that still didn’t get her to the line in the Stade de France.

She lists off a reel of names who played a part in her story over these months: her boyfriend and core member of her team Thomas, her departed mentor Jerry Kiernan, her sports doctor John Rodgers, a consultant in St Moritz, her physio, Kate Kirby in the Sports Institute and her aunt Edel.

The pain in her ankle was so bad in France that she didn’t even know if there was a full 1500m in her, let alone a final or a medal. The medical advice was that her health had to come first but she was willing to prioritise the running anyway, until the inevitable dawned. It was, she said, the hardest decision of her life.

“Sport is a little microcosm of life. You experience all the emotions other people get throughout their lives all in one little season, or one little sporting career. There's been a few moments in my life where I've felt sheer grief and loss - the loss of my grandmother when I was at university, she died far too young. Whenever Jerry passed away and I was in Manchester, I wasn't at home and I hadn't really had as much of a connection as I always wanted to have.

“I thought I'd come home and have Jerry the rest of my life. It always feels kind of crass to compare sport to that but it quite often gives you the same emotions. It was a grief to be able to have the loss of a dream. It's my life's work and it's everything that I've put all of my energy into, but also all of those people around me have put their lives and things on pause and on hold to pursue my dreams.”

Ciara Mageean is interviewed by MC Greg Allen during the award ceremony. Picture: Sam Barnes/Sportsfile

If the hurt has yet to fade from the surface then the process of digesting it and moving on has been happening in tandem. She squares it away now with the realisation that she was the one to put all of her eggs in this basket. She was soon starting to plot the way forward and there is humour in there to curb the harshest edges too.

“I'm really unlucky to have been given two Achilles heels that are my Achilles heels!”

She tells a lovely story of how she stood in one of Paris’ many cathedrals after her withdrawal, her father Chris with his arm around her shoulder and suggesting that maybe it was time to call it a day, come home to watch some hurling together and finally get herself a dog.

Mageean still hasn’t watched the women’s 1500m final, and just seeing a track was unbearable for most of the summer. She avoided the Village in the knowledge that teammates preparing for their big moments didn’t need someone with her energy at that time but there was never any chance of her walking away.

LA 2028 was already in her sights before Paris was parked. The injury has only added “fire to the belly” to make it to California where Jerry Kiernan had recorded a top-ten finish in the Games there four years ago. She likes the thought of going back to a place with that connection for what would be her third Olympics.

There is no guarantee that this surgery, same as the one over a decade ago, will actually work. She has no programme in place for 2025 and expects to be months behind everyone else when she finally returns to the track but so much else has been put in place with the injury acting as a “catalyst for change”.

Mageean has left her Manchester base where she trained under Helen Clitheroe with the New Balance team and returned home to the bosom of her family and her country. The plan is to build a bespoke team around her in Ireland where she will avail of supports in both Belfast and Dublin.

“Listen that’s life,” she said of the surgery risks. “I have to be hopeful. There is not going to be any longevity in me continuing in the pain that I was in, so it was really my only option and, so far, ten weeks in, it’s been going well. The rehab is going in the right direction, the prognosis from the surgeon was that it would take six months until I get to run.

“When I sat down with my physio, I said I want to focus on the World Champs [in 2025 in September], ‘tell me if that’s not a realistic goal?’ He said no it's later in the season, you already have your 1500m qualification and I definitely think that’s a goal that you can aim towards.

“He did ask me what my goal was in the championships and I grinned because if you’re going to go, you're going to go for gold, you’re going to go and try to get yourself on that podium.”

She is nowhere near done yet.