Adeleke off the pace on 400m return in Eugene

The Dubliner finished ninth in 52.26 seconds.

BACK ON TRACK: Rhasidat Adeleke. Pic: Sam Barnes/Sportsfile

Rhasidat Adeleke turned in a sub-par performance on her return to the 400m at the Eugene Diamond League in Oregon last night, the 23-year-old Dubliner finishing ninth in 52.26 seconds.

It was Adeleke’s first 400m since the same meeting 12 months ago, when she clocked 51.33 to finish fourth. But this was some way down on that again, Adeleke a long way off the 49.07 Irish record she ran to win silver at the Europeans in 2024.

Running in lane three, she put herself into contention over the opening half but began to fade on the final bend and struggled significantly in the last 100m, coming home at the back of the field. The race was won by the reigning NCAA champion Dejanea Oakley of Jamaica in 49.64, with last year’s NCAA champion Aaliyah Butler second in 49.97.

Adeleke, who won the NCAA title in 2023, had raced only three times this year prior to this, clocking an Irish indoor best of 36.30 for 300m in February, running a leg of a 4x400m relay in Texas in early April and a 200m outing in Texas in late April when she clocked 22.86.

Her performance in Eugene is the slowest she’s run a 400m since January 2022, when she began to focus more on the event at the age of 19. With just over five weeks until the European Championships in Birmingham, Adeleke was a long way outside the 400m qualifying standard of 51.20. She will have another chance to secure that at the Monaco Diamond League next Friday.

After a breakthrough 2024 season, in which she won silver at the European Championships in Rome and finished fourth at the Paris Olympics, Adeleke struggled to recapture that same form in 2025 and withdrew from the Tokyo World Championships, telling RTÉ last December that she had “several different injuries, from hamstring to groin to knee” during the year.

“They are all stimulating from a condition that I have,” she added. “We are just trying to make sure that everything is managed and maintained.” She has been working with coach Edrick Floreal since the start of 2021, when she moved to Austin to enrol at the University of Texas, which she has kept as her base since turning professional in 2023.

Elsewhere, Paris Olympian Cathal Doyle finished eighth in the 1500m at the Meeting Stanislas Nancy in France last night, the Dubliner clocking a season’s best of 3:33.52, just 0.02 outside the automatic European qualifying standard.

Sarah Healy will race the women’s mile on the second day of action at the Eugene Diamond League, her race going to the line at 10.37pm Irish time tonight, with live coverage on Virgin Media Two from 9pm.