'You worry if it's selfish' — Magic McCormack on motherhood, influencers and new heights at 40
MOM POWER: Fionnuala McCormack of Ireland competing in the women's marathon final during day two of the World Athletics Championships Tokyo 2025 at Japan National Stadium in Tokyo, Japan. Photo by Sam Barnes/Sportsfile
One by one, she picked them off. Athlete after athlete, appearing in her sights and then hunted down, passed and left for dead – Fionnuala McCormack slicing through the field en route to the best finish of her career at global level.
Ninth in the World Championships marathon: a result that left her beaming with pride in the bowels of the Japan National Stadium. A memory that will stay with her forever.
Drenched in sweat, after two and a half hours of suffering on the sweltering streets of Tokyo, the mother of three, who turns 41 next week, did something she rarely does: reflecting on what she’d achieved. That’s usually not her way, McCormack typically eschewing the limelight, preferring to let her results do the talking.
McCormack is a two-time European Cross Country champion, the most-capped Irish female athlete in history, and the only Irishwoman to have competed at five Olympics. But if she walked down Grafton Street tomorrow, well, it’s safe to say she wouldn’t be inundated with selfie requests. And that’s just how she wants it.
She’s a modest, private person. She rarely does interviews. She doesn’t have social media. She doesn’t even own a smartphone. While some Irish athletes have crossed the bridge into the world of celebrity, that’d be her worst nightmare. Attention and adulation? She hands it off like a hot potato.
“That’s not why I started in the sport and it’s not what I want to get out of it,” she said on Sunday in Tokyo. “Maybe it’s selfish, I don’t know. I run for me, for Al [McCormack – her husband], for my family. I love wearing the Irish singlet and running for Ireland. For me, it’s about the running and it’s not about influencers. The way the world is now, it’s just not for me. I don’t have any interest in social media.”
Given her achievements, McCormack could undoubtedly bolster her income by leaning into that world but to do so would betray who she is. “I think I’m just a private person and I don’t feel the need to share all that,” she said.
When she does talk, however, she’s deeply insightful, refreshingly blunt. When pitched a question yesterday about juggling motherhood with professional sport, she proved as much. McCormack has three daughters – Isla (6), Isabelle (4) and Naomi (2) – and she has heard ad nauseum how motherhood confers sportswomen with a certain tranquility about their sporting successes or failures. She doesn’t buy it.
“Everyone says you have kids and all of a sudden, you don’t worry about anything anymore – that’s not true,” she said. “I’m still the same. I still worry about the same things. I still get nervous. You nearly worry about more things. You worry about [your children], you worry about everything you’re doing. You worry if it’s selfish.”
Over the summer, McCormack and her family spent a month in Font Romeu, a commune in the French Pyrenees with lots of outdoor activities for children which is also one of the world’s best spots for altitude training. She’d long ago pencilled the Tokyo World Championships into her plans, knowing how revered the marathon is in Japan, understanding how special an experience it’d be to run 42.2km around those streets.
“If the World Champs were somewhere else, I think I’d maybe not have been quite as motivated by it,” she said. “The Japanese missed out on a lot with the Olympics and it’s nice to be able to come back and see what they would have done with the Olympics. I love the thought of going to support the event.”
McCormack trains alone, never needing a group environment to get the best out of herself, possessing a pain tolerance that’s notable even among elite distance runners. The tougher the conditions, the higher she usually places, so when she saw that organisers of Sunday’s marathon were moving the start time forward 30 minutes due to excessive heat and humidity, she relished what was about to unfold – a war of attrition.
As it turned out, it was ‘only’ 29 degrees yesterday morning, with humidity in the 70s. “I was almost disappointed that it wasn’t as hot as (predicted),” she said.
McCormack made a sensible, conservative start and she was in 33rd after 10km, covered in 35:21. By halfway, reached in 1:15:17, she’d moved up to 26th, while at 30km she was 18th. Picking off athletes, one by one. She ran much of the race with Japan’s Sayaka Sato, which left her running through a constant tunnel of noise.
At the Olympics four years ago, fans in Sapporo were told to clap rather than cheer due to fears about spreading Covid-19, which McCormack said made the marathon feel like a “funeral procession”. But this was something else entirely. “It was three, four deep most of the way,” she said. “It was very cool.”
Gold went to Kenya’s Peres Jepchirchir in 2:24:43, but McCormack wasn’t too far behind the former Olympic champion, clocking 2:30:16 to finish ninth. It was a run that vanquished any lingering frustrations from her Olympic marathon results in Rio (20th), Tokyo (25th) and Paris (28th). “You have so many bad days,” she said. “But it just makes you want to come back.”
This one was different in many ways. “Usually I’m like, ‘I have to come back again to redeem myself,’ whereas this time, I don’t really feel like that.” Twenty-one years on from her first senior Irish cap, McCormack just keeps coming back for more. Could she compete at a sixth Olympics in Los Angeles? “It depends what they put the [qualifying] standard at – it’ll probably be 2:15 by then,” she said with a laugh.
But on this day, thoughts about the future could wait – McCormack reflecting on her run with justified pride, though she wouldn’t be the athlete she is if she thought it was the limit of her ability. “I think I did everything I could on the day, but I’ll obviously look back after and think, ‘I could have been fifth.’”
That’s what made her the athlete she is. Driven. Determined. Committed to the point of obsession. Modest to the point of self-deprecating. She’s not like most others, McCormack. She doesn’t want the plaudits. But when she runs as she did in Tokyo yesterday, that’s all the more reason to give them to her.
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