Cork hammer thrower Nicola Tuthill aims high: Every year you’re getting stronger, faster, your technique is improving
WORLD IN HER HANDS: Nicola Tuthill has raised her ceiling this season but can it yield a medal at the European Championships? Picture: INPHO/Dan Sheridan
There’s an accepted wisdom in athletics that consistency is the precursor to a big breakthrough. If you just keep tapping away, week after week, then one day that wall will crumble.
Few in Irish athletics are as consistent as Nicola Tuthill. The 22-year-old Cork hammer thrower has competed seven times this year and thrown over 70 metres every time, her best being the 72.73m she threw in Poznan, Poland, to defeat three-time Olympic champion Anita Wlodarczyk.
Last year, in the 10 events she contested between March and September, there were just three metres between Tuthill’s best and worst results – a season that included U23 gold at the European Throwing Cup and silver at both the European U23 Championships and World University Games.
The point? Her off days are not very off at all. The performance floor has been raised. So too has its ceiling. But what’s led to that? For her coach, Killian Barry, it comes down to Tuthill’s mentality and the standards she expects every day.
“She has a real unique temperament,” he says. “When she’s put in really pressurised environments, she seems to take it in her stride. And she has such high standards across the board. If she’s off more than a metre in a low-key competition, she’s really frustrated at herself and wanting to figure out why.
“In some ways the standards she sets for herself are unrealistic, but she’s done it for years and it’s resulted in her being ultra consistent. Even when put in those pressurised environments, she’s able to handle it because she’s kept herself to a really elite standard, whether in the depths of winter or at the Olympics or European Championships.”
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Tuthill has quietly, steadily developed into a world-class thrower in recent years, throwing over 68 metres for the first time in 2023, then over 70m in 2024, over 71m in 2025 and over 72m in 2026.
Brick by brick, building herself into a true contender.
“With consistency hopefully comes a longer throw,” she says.
Tuthill will go into next week’s European Championships ranked 10th in the women’s hammer. Two years ago in Rome, aged 20, she made her debut on this stage and finished ninth. Last year, at 21, she vastly outperformed her ranking to reach the world final in Tokyo, finishing 11th.
“A world final was really special,” she says. “I’m very competitive so I went out there with that as one of the goals I wanted to achieve. I knew it’d be difficult.”
Barry has coached Tuthill since 2019 and says she has “really developed across the board, whether her technical side, strength, speed, power, technical elements”. But coming into 2026, he thought the time was right to make a change to the early part of her throw – wanting to embed the new technique with lots of lead-in time before the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics.
“She’s a real workhorse when it comes to her sport and her attention to detail, it was some big enough changes, but she took to it great,” he says. “It’s a dream as a coach to work with [her]. She holds herself to such high standards.”
The Irish record of 73.21m, set by Eileen O’Keeffe in 2007, has been on Tuthill’s mind this summer. “I’d love to break [it],” she says. “Whether it happens this year or not or whether it ever happens, I don’t know. It’s a massive throw. If I get it, it’ll be amazing, but I’m not going to be focused on that. It’s [about being] focused on competing and making the changes I need to throw far.”
Tuthill was chiefly a runner in her youth but transitioned to throwing in 2019. That same year – in a bid to save her time commuting as she prepared for the Junior Cert – her parents built a hammer circle on their family farm outside Bandon, where Tuthill still does much of her training. She recently started a master’s at UCD, which will be completed next June, then she’ll have just over a year before the Los Angeles Olympics.
Despite her youth, she’s already accrued enough experience that it’s no longer about finding her feet at this level. Not that Tuthill was ever a championship tourist.
“For your first major champs, everyone will say about [getting] the experience but I’m always that competitive person so I went into every major champs knowing what I wanted to achieve and not getting too consumed with the fact that it was my first time,” she says. “Having had that experience, you don’t have that as an excuse anymore.
More than 1500 Irish fans will make the journey to Birmingham and Tuthill says it will be “basically an Irish Games,” adding, “It’s going to be exciting to be in the stadium and look around – all my family and friends are going to be there. That drives on performances as well.”
Whatever happens next week, she knows her journey is only really getting started. “Every year you’re getting stronger, faster, your technique is improving,” she says.
Barry, like Tuthill, won’t be thinking so much about the finishing position – too many external factors can influence that – but her execution. In an event where athletes usually peak in their late 20s, he knows Tuthill is still far from the finished product.
“We are obsessed about the process and what’s behind the result,” he says. “Potential doesn’t mean much in this game, but Nicola has such a higher ceiling. There’s nothing across the components that relate to the hammer where she feels as if she’s made it.
"She feels she can improve across every area and as long as she stays healthy, maintains that level of focus she has, I’ve no doubt she’ll push on.”
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