Nicola Tuthill aiming to build on promising start to 2025

Tuthill has been announced as one of 12 athletes who will be supported this year by the Jerry Kiernan foundation.

FUNDING: Joe Doody, Dara Donoghue, Hugh Armstrong, Ciara Neville, and Nicola Tuthill at the announcement of athletes supported by the Jerry Kiernan Foundation in 2025. Pic: Morgan Treacy/Inpho

Nicola Tuthill lives two very different lives.

One is just like your average student: Lectures, assignments, lesson plans, and all that. The other is spent mastering the art of spinning around a concrete circle and firing a 4kg metal ball off into the sky, landing it 70m-plus away.

For half of each week, Tuesday to Thursday, she’s in Dublin, where she’s on scholarship at UCD and midway through her degree in maths and science in education. The rest of her time is spent in Cork, the Kilbrittain native working under coach Killian Barry to get a little stronger, faster, and more explosive each day.

When she returned to UCD in the autumn, she had one hell of an answer for classmates on how she spent her summer — Tuthill was a late qualifier for the Paris Olympics and competed in front of 75,000 fans at the age of just 20.

“It was amazing,” she says. “There were so many Irish, it was basically like a home championships.”

She was the youngest competitor in the hammer throw and the call room had the feel of being beneath the Colosseum as she heard the thunderous roar of the crowd above.

A walk down a tunnel led her into that cauldron where the nerves hit, but Tuthill reminded herself: “It is the pinnacle of the sport, everyone wants to be there. Looking around and taking that all in was pretty cool.”

After sending the hammer into the net on her first attempt, she “kept calm” and launched a big effort in the second round, then went bigger again in the third, her 69.90m leaving her 16th overall and just over a metre shy of making the final.

Tuthill had been all over Europe last summer, sitting her exams at UCD early to allow her chase Olympic qualification, her ninth-place finish in the European final helping that cause.

But hopping around the circuit is an expensive game, which is where support from the Jerry Kiernan Foundation was vital, with Tuthill among the list of athletes supported last year.

“The bulk of the money would have gone towards me being able to travel to get those ranking points,” she says.

Tuthill has been announced as one of 12 athletes who will be supported this year by the foundation, which was set up by Murt Coleman to honour the legacy of the late, great coach and athlete. She will also receive a Sport Ireland grant of €18,000. When it comes to athletics, every little helps. “I have equipment fees, coaching fees, and I’m travelling to Cork every week so there’s a lot of travel expenses even before I go abroad,” says Tuthill, adding that the support allows her “to go home more often, meet my coaches more often”.

She made a superb start to 2025, winning Ireland’s first ever gold medal at the European Throwing Cup in Cyprus last month with a 69.74m throw.

“It was amazing to stand up on the top of the podium and listen to the national anthem. I really wanted it as I’d been second the two years previous, but it was such a strong field. To throw close to 70 that early in the season was really promising.”

In training, she’s been doing a “a lot of heavy volume”, working on her strength, speed, and power, while adding that there are “so many technical elements” she can still improve.

“I’m more of a speed and power, technical-based thrower, but if I can add strength to that too and nail the technical part, hopefully that’ll make the difference and I can get over 70 consistently and beyond.”

The hammer is an event where athletes typically peak in their late 20s or early 30s, so to be this close to the world’s elite at 21 speaks to Tuthill’s potential. Her Irish U23 record of 70.32m looks on borrowed time, though this year will be all about championships.

Tuthill will target the European Team Championships in June, the European U23s and World University Games in July and hopes to be at the big one in September: The World Championships in Tokyo.

“It could be a busy summer,” says Tuthill, and her mission is simple: “I’d love to break 70 a bit more consistently, and that would lead to me achieving the rest of my goals.”

Jerry Kiernan Foundation – supported athletes 2025: Hugh Armstrong, Dara Donohue, Ryan Creech, Joe Doody, Ciara Neville, Keelan Kilrehill, Nicola Tuthill, Shona Heaslip, Oisin Joyce, Bori Akinola, John Fitzsimons, Charlie O’Donovan