Kate O'Connor: 'For the last lap and a half, I kept saying to myself — how much do you want this medal?’
Kate O'Connor of Ireland celebrates throwing a personal best of 14.64m in the shot put event of the women's pentathlon. Pic: Sportsfile
Kate O’Connor has won the first global multi-events medal in history for Ireland, the 24-year-old Dundalk athlete taking a superb silver in the pentathlon at the World Indoor Championships in Nanjing, China.
Just 12 days on from her bronze medal at the European Indoors, O’Connor produced lifetime best performances in three of the five disciplines to finish on 4742 points, just shy of the Irish record of 4781 she scored in Apeldoorn recently.
Gold in Nanjing went to European champion Saga Vanninen of Finland with 4821 points, while O’Connor overtook USA’s Taliyah Brooks in the concluding 800m to take silver, Brooks taking bronze with 4669 points.
Going into the 800m, O’Connor was third in the standings, just three points behind Brooks. While Vanninen was out of reach, her lead over O’Connor equating to almost eight seconds at 800m, O’Connor needed to beat Brooks by just one quarter of a second to snatch silver. She did far more than that, dropping the hammer on the final lap to reach the line third in 2:14.19, with Brooks clocking 2:19.67 and Vanninen 2:15.28.
“I kept an eye on her for 500 metres and then I didn’t look back,” said O’Connor. “I just was running for the line. For the last lap and a half, I kept saying to myself: ‘How much do you want this medal?’ She wasn’t ever going to get past me; there was no way that was happening.”
O’Connor admitted it had been “really tough” to pick herself up and reproduce a similar effort so soon after her last pentathlon. “There were a lot of different variables going on: the flight, the time difference. I was definitely anxious coming into this, coming off such a high. ‘Can I produce again?’ But I know I’m in good shape. I tried to go out and enjoy myself as much as I could.
“Maybe having the European medal under my belt was a blessing because in a way my job was done, I’d done more than I wanted to do in the first place, so I was able to relax and enjoy the competition.”
Ireland had never won a multi-events medal at a senior championships before O’Connor’s European Indoor bronze earlier this month, and she is the first Irish medallist at the World Indoors since Derval O’Rourke in 2006.
“I think I was five when Derval won,” laughed O’Connor. “I’d seen a few things that there hadn’t been a medal in so long but I was just trying to do my own thing, selfishly enough zone out. I had my own job to do. But I’m chuffed hearing it’s the first one in a while. I was just trying to take each event as it came, trust the form that I’m in. I knew everything was there, it was just a case of going out and doing it.”
She is just the seventh Irish athlete to win an individual medal at World Indoors in the 41-year history of the championships and she joins O’Rourke, David Gillick and Marcus O’Sullivan as the only Irish athletes with medals from both the European and World Indoor Championships.
O’Connor got her day off to a flying start with a personal best of 8.30 in the 60m hurdles, which she followed with an impressive 1.81m clearance in the high jump, just shy of her PB of 1.84m. Another PB followed in the shot put, where she threw 14.64m, and a third in the long jump where she jumped a best of 6.32m.
With a similar PB to Vanninen over 800m and a 94-point deficit, she knew gold was most likely out of reach and so her mission in the 800m was to defeat Brooks. She slotted into fourth place through the opening lap, with Brooks tracking her, and hit 400m in 66 seconds. O’Connor moved up to third approaching the final lap, and emptied the tank over the final 200m to claim another historic medal for Ireland.
“I knew there was a medal there but as an athlete you always want more,” she said. “I’m getting fond of chasing girls down and beating them in the 800m which seems to be half decently well for me. Although it’s really nerve-wracking on the line, it’s nice to have something to fight for in the (800m) and it makes the medal even sweeter.”
O’Connor splits her time between her native Dundalk and Belfast, where she’s doing a master’s at Ulster University. She has multiple coaches for her various events, though her father Michael steers the overall ship. A teenage prodigy, she won silver in the heptathlon at the European U20 Championships in 2019, though struggled at times as she transitioned to senior level, missing the Tokyo Olympics in 2021 and the 2022 Europeans due to bone stress injuries.
She won silver at the Commonwealth Games in 2022 and became an Olympian in Paris last year, finishing 14th in the heptathlon. Given her strongest event of the seven is the javelin, which is not part of the pentathlon, her indoor breakthrough bodes very well for her potential in the outdoor event, with O’Connor’s big target for the rest of the year being September’s World Championships in Tokyo.
Given her breakthrough indoors, it’s likely O’Connor can score over 6500 points outdoors in the heptathlon, a score that would make her a top-five contender at the World Championships or Olympics.
“As an athlete you’re never going to just stop,” she said. “You always want to be at the top but right now I’m really, really happy and content with what I’ve done. I think there’s a lot more opportunity for me to get better, do better, and I finished injury free. It exceeded what we wanted to do so my team said, ‘Go off and enjoy yourself, chill for a little bit and then we’ll get back working for outdoors.’”
Elsewhere, there was disappointment for Andrew Coscoran in the men’s 1500m heats, the Dubliner unable to match the closing speed of the top two, Jakob Ingebrigtsen (3:39.80) and Raphael Pallitsch of Austria (3:40.08) who claimed the two automatic qualifying spots for the final. Coscoran came home third in 3:40.79, his time not quick enough to advance as a non-automatic qualifier. He will contest the 3000m final tomorrow.
There was also no joy for Sophie O’Sullivan in the women’s 1500m heats, the 23-year-old making a bold bid to stay in contention for a top-three qualifying position but unable to match the leaders’ change of gears over the last two laps and coming home sixth in 4:16.68.
: Live, BBC Two, Eurovision Sport
: Sarah Healy, women’s 3000m final
: Andrew Coscoran, James Gormley, men’s 3000m final
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