'It was pretty solid evidence that I didn’t want to go back': Thomas Barr brings curtain down on athletics career
Ireland’s Tom Barr in Rome. Pic: Morgan Treacy/Inpho
Now that it's over, his race finally run, there are many things he’ll miss about the sport. Chief among them? “The people, the craic, the trips away,” he says.
Thomas Barr will also miss the days when the 400m hurdles, that man-killer event, would just click together like flatpack furniture – a sweet, 48-second symphony of speed and strength and technical precision. But as he hangs up his spikes, ending his career at the age of 32, there are also some things he won’t miss.
“Basing every decision I make, no matter how small or large, around how it’ll affect training,” he says. “There was so much governed by training and it literally is like taking a weight off. I won’t miss the hard work and torturous schedule.”
He has known for many months this day was coming, but after a career spent haring around the track, Barr came to it like a tortoise.
It was too big a decision to do any other way. He can trace the roots of it to a dank, dark evening last November.
Barr had yet to resume training after his break but his coach, Hayley Harrison, had had hip surgery around that time and asked if he’d pop down to help out with the session.
As he stood there, timing his training partners, there was no mistaking the feeling within.
“I thought, ‘I could think of nothing worse now than getting into spikes and running up and down this track,’” he says. “I was thinking, ‘Why do any of us do this? What is the point?’ I spent 14 years in high performance, doing exactly what they’re doing, and all of a sudden the switch is flicked and I’m like, ‘Why am I doing this?’ It was pretty solid evidence that I didn’t want to go back.”
Through the autumn, his mind was host to two warring factions. On one side: “Why not go another year when this is the shape I’m in?”
On the other: “Isn’t that a great place to finish the sport after such a good year? I was very much on the fence.”
He chose to give it a few months, living the life of a non-athlete before reassessing.
Barr took up part-time work with Develop Me, doing workshops with Transition Year students.
He went into business with Timmy Crowe of Sports Equipment Ireland. He ate what he wanted. Went out when he wanted.
“That made me realise this is a part of my life I’ve had on hold for a long time,” he says.
He talked to many others who’d walked this path. Most told him to keep at it “until the wheels fall off.” But Barr knew what the sport required: everything he had. He no longer felt able to give it.
And so he has now brought the curtain down on one of the great careers in Irish athletics. Barr won 13 national titles in total.
He was World University Games champion in 2015. A European bronze medallist in 2018. Last year, he helped Ireland to bronze medals at the World Relays in the Bahamas and to gold at the Europeans in Rome, where he split the fastest leg of his career in the mixed 4x400m, 44.90.
But the highlight? Rio, hands down. In 2016, Barr became the first Irish athlete for 84 years to make an Olympic final in a sprint event, clocking 47.97 to finish fourth in the 400m hurdles, just five-hundredths of a second off a medal.
Unlike many who occupy that position, he was ecstatic.
“To finish with a 47.97 beside my name and fourth place in an Olympic final, which I’d never dreamed of reaching, ever, it still doesn’t feel real.”
That high came a few months after one of his biggest lows. Barr had been crocked for about 11 weeks on the build-up to Rio, unable to train between April and June due to a hip labral tear.
Juggling that with his final exams at UL created a stress that was “physically crippling.” One day, it got too much.
“I was at such a low that I wanted to quit,” he says. Barr called his mother in floods of tears. “She said, ‘Why are you worrying about things you can’t control? Do what your physio is telling you, put your focus on what you can control and it’ll come right.’”
By July, he was healthy again and the Harrisons – Hayley and Drew – put him on a stripped-back training programme ahead of the Games and suddenly, somehow, it all clicked.
There were many other glorious days. In 2018, after his European bronze in Berlin, the Irish fans carried him atop their shoulders outside the stadium. He’ll miss the nights like the one that followed.
“As much as standing on the podium or coming across the line are top-notch, the times I cherish and think back on the most are the celebrations with friends and family,” he says.
There are far too many people to thank. His parents, obviously, and Brid Golden at Ferrybank AC. Without them, he’d never have been an athlete.
The Harrisons, to whom he owes his “entire professional career.” His older sister Jessie, an Olympian who “made the high levels of sport so normal” to him.
Physios Emma Gallivan and Kathryn Fahy and massage therapist James Sullivan, who all kept his body going when it was crying surrender. His strength coach Tommy Comyns, with whom he had “some craic” in the gym.
His manager Sinéad Galvin, who was “not a money-grabbing agent” but someone who “always put the athletes first".
Then there’s his girlfriend, Kelly McGrory, who became an Olympian alongside him last year.
They met at the Intervarsities’ afterparty in 2017 and it’s one of many relationships he’ll carry with him from a sport that gave him so much, and to which he gave everything.
But now a new life beckons. Time to write a different chapter.
“I spent a lot of my career saying no and as Kelly says, I’m now in my saying-yes era,” he laughs. “I have the freedom to do what I want to do. And that really does excite me.”
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