Where has Darragh McElhinney been and why is he back?

Ever since finishing fourth in the 2023 European Indoor 3000m final in Istanbul, he’s been absent from the major stage, struggling to reproduce top form.

Sat, 13 Sep, 2025 - 06:58

Cathal Dennehy

Many times over the last two and a half years, Darragh McElhinney was asked questions for which he didn’t really have an answer: What’s up? Where have you been?

Ever since finishing fourth in the 2023 European Indoor 3000m final in Istanbul, he’s been absent from the major stage, struggling to reproduce top form, knowing something was wrong but unable to identify what it was.

“It’s hard to wrap my head around because I never had a clear answer while it was happening,” he says now, in Tokyo, where he will don the Irish vest over 5000m at the World Championships next week. “A lot of the time I just thought I was gone shit. I honestly thought I’m just not good enough, basically.”

But the 24-year-old Glengarriff native works far too hard and has far too much talent for his results in recent years to be a fair reflection of his ability. But what happened? Things began to go awry shortly before his first race of the 2023 outdoor season, McElhinney picking up an illness that left a mark long after it cleared his system.

“I wasn’t really showing any symptoms of sickness, but I just couldn’t train properly,” he says. “I’d very low energy all the time, and that really only started to clear up at the start of this year. So that was a year and a half. It wasn’t always apparent in bloods, doctor appointments.

“It took a long time for me to crawl out of it and while I was in the midst of it, I didn’t know what was wrong, which was probably the hardest part. There wasn’t one thing where I could go, ‘Right, fix this, and I’ll be grand’. I didn’t have clear answers, and that made it a lot harder. I said plenty of times last summer, ‘Jeez, I’d love if I just got a f**king stress fracture’. Then no one would ask any more questions.”

In 2023, his best for 5000m was a mediocre 13:29.77, while in 2024 it was just 13:35.99. The Paris Olympics had to be watched from afar. “It’s hard to enjoy it for what it is when you’re on the outside looking in, you’re so jealous you’re not there, you’re so pissed off. I was on holidays last year and you’d see it on TV in every bar and it was a kick in the balls every time.”

McElhinney lost his contract with adidas at the end of last year, but he received continued support from Sport Ireland via the International Carding Scheme. “I’m lucky to be carded,” he says. “Even though nothing was coming up, everyone in Sport Ireland was very supportive, trying to find out the story. I was in with the doctor regularly, sports psychs.”

At his side through all the struggles was his coach, Emmett Dunleavy, who kept him convinced he’d rediscover his best. “I got the sense no one gave up on me. I don’t want to say I gave up on myself, but obviously I was having doubts – that maybe I just wasn’t at the level anymore.”

Last autumn, McElhinney tried a new approach in training which came about from a consultation with Belgian physiologist Jan Olbrecht, who identified that his VLa Max – a measure of his body’s maximum lactate production – was below par. Olbrecht advised him to spend six weeks training it via low-volume, high-intensity sessions like 8x200m, the kind of stuff he’d rarely do, and he incorporated one session each week over a six-week block. But that metric only got worse from that approach.

“He said doing this in a half-arsed way isn’t going to work,” recalls McElhinney. “He was saying to cut my mileage in half and to do three VLa sessions a week. I was like, ‘Jesus, I’ve never done anything like this in my life.’ Me and Emmett were like, ‘Do we rubbish this or buy into it fully?’ We were like, ‘F**k it, we’ll buy into it fully.’”

It was an unorthodox approach, but McElhinney committed to it for six weeks at the end of last year and when he resumed his more traditional training in the new year, there was a clear improvement. “I felt better, I had way more energy, I was running 30-40 seconds quicker per mile on my easy runs. There was a lot of time during that period I didn’t know if it was working. It took a long time to see the results.”

It wasn’t until the summer that he truly flourished, McElhinney going second on the Irish all-time 5000m list when clocking 13:02.06 in Belgium, with a subsequent 7:35.16 3000m in Budapest putting him on the cusp of World Championships qualification. It was only last Saturday, after waking up and seeing four missed calls from his mother, that he got confirmation he’d made the cut.

Few will expect him to make the final in Tokyo next week, but he’s happy to toe the line as a big underdog. Either way, he’s relishing being back in an Irish vest and believes he can make an impact. “It does feel like the second part of my career. I’m coming into my prime now, with a bit more ambition and a better head on my shoulders.

“I ran 13:02 but there’s no difference really between me and a guy who’s run 12:56. You just never know. I raced a lot this year and I learned a lot. On any day, you can beat anyone and anyone can beat you. There’s gonna be lads who ran in the low 13s who are in the final so I’m like, ‘Why not me?’”

World Athletics Championships – Irish in action

Saturday (all times Irish):

11.30pm (Friday): Oisín Lane – Men’s 35km race walk

2.55am: Eric Favors – Men’s shot put qualification

3.55am: Mixed 4x400m relay heats

11.50am: Sarah Healy, Sophie O’Sullivan, Laura Nicholson – Women’s 1,500m heats

1.10pm: Eric Favors – Men’s shot put final*

2.20pm: Mixed 4x400m relay final*

11.30pm: Fionnuala McCormack – Women’s marathon

Sunday

1am: Nicola Tuthill – Women’s hammer throw qualification

1.35am: Andrew Coscoran, Cathal Doyle – Men’s 1500m heats