'The journey makes this so much sweeter' - Adeleke finds silver lining in Birmingham bounceback

Rhasidat Adeleke of Ireland celebrates with her silver medal from the women's 200m. Pic: Sam Barnes/Sportsfile

How to sum up these last two years? Between those individual silver medals at the European Championships – the first over 400m, the latest over 200m – Rhasidat Adeleke had been to hell and back.

Injuries. Under-performances. The pressure of public scrutiny. Soon after the 200m medal ceremony in Birmingham, the 23-year-old opened a window into what she’d been through.

“The journey makes this so much sweeter,” she said. “The flashbacks of the times I cried in my room. I never cried so much in my life. It’s been a really hard year.” To understand what went wrong in 2025 and for much of 2026, it’s essential to go back to 2024. On the build-up to the Paris Olympics, Adeleke was flying, clocking a wind-assisted 10.84 for 100m early in the season, then breaking her own national record to win European 400m silver in Rome in 49.07, also helping Ireland’s mixed 4x400m team to gold and the women’s 4x400m to silver.

In that 400m final, she led with 50 metres to run but couldn’t match the speed endurance of Poland’s Natalia Kaczmarek coming home, missing gold by less than a tenth of a second. A month later, the same thing happened in the Olympic 400m final, Adeleke tying up in the last 50m, clocking 49.28 – beaten to bronze by Kaczmarek by just 0.30.

As her coach, Edrick Floreal, plotted her course for 2025, that last 100m was where the emphasis was in training.

“We definitely did change the training a lot,” said Adeleke. “Coming up from the short sprints, I probably lacked that conditioning and foundation that a lot of other 400m runners who’ve been running it their whole lives had. We wanted to build my strength and I think the type of training we were doing, my body just didn’t like it.” 

Adeleke was beset by physical issues through 2025, from hamstring to knee and groin injuries, which she said last December were “all stimulating from a condition” that she has.

Then there was also the psychological battle. She’d accrued significant fame in 2024. Did that weigh on her when her results started regressing in 2025?

“I think subconsciously it did,” she says. “I’m someone who just advocates that pressure is a privilege, it’s an honour for people to believe in you and have high expectations and I still believe that. But I didn’t know how to navigate the new-found pressure.

“I’ve had pressure almost my whole life. I came up the ranks from junior, under-18, and it wasn’t foreign to me. After Paris, it definitely was a lot more. But I don’t think that was necessarily why my performances weren’t where they were.”

She ran a solid 400m in Oslo in June last year, clocking 50.42, then a solid 200m in London, 22.52, but withdrew from the nationals and later the Tokyo World Championships, with Floreal saying she “cannot compete at a world class level” due to injuries.

“It just broke my body down and it was just always something,” she said. “I wasn’t originally someone who was injury-prone so the fact my body just wasn’t responding well to the training just told us that was something we shouldn’t have been doing.” Floreal changed things again for 2026. “It still wasn’t exactly the same as what I used to do,” says Adeleke. “But it was closer.” Early this year, the signs were promising. But then Adeleke strained her hamstring in March, which ruled her out for four weeks. She got back from that and was all set to start racing in June. Then she strained her other hamstring. Another four weeks out.

“I came back the week before Prefontaine Classic and we saw what happened there,” she says, referencing the 52.26-second clocking to finish ninth and last. The focus quickly shifted to the 200m.

“I just wasn’t able to compound the training I needed to run the four, which is usually what works best for me: that repetition, that constant building that gives me the confidence to know I’m strong enough and fit enough to perform at the highest level.” She went to Lucerne in Switzerland in mid-July chasing the European qualifying standard of 22.85, but came up well short with 23.07.

“I was like, ‘I’m cooked.’ But I just kept showing up. I had to put my ego aside a bit.” Onwards to nationals, where she had one last shot to hit the standard. And she did it, clocking 22.80 into a headwind, booking her place in Birmingham. She stayed in Dublin between events, working daily with strength and conditioning coach Martina McCarthy and physio Ciara McCallion at the Sport Ireland Institute.

Every day, she got fitter. Every day, she felt better.

What did Floreal say to her going into last week’s European final? “Just keeping the same mindset, really,” she said.

The run was her best ever at 200m, the national record of 22.28 delivering a superb silver medal. One that was appreciated in a whole different way.

“If I’d won a silver medal a couple of years ago, I’d have been upset,” she said. “In Rome I wasn’t happy with that. I would have liked to win, and I was focused on that for a while. But here, I have a new-found gratitude for every little thing.” So, will she focus more on the 200m or 400m in the years ahead?

“I don’t know,” she said. “I have a lot of love for the 400, it’s obviously my newer event. I’ve been doing the 100 and 200 all my life and then I switched a couple of years ago. We’re just going to have to figure out over the next couple of months.” The rocky period has passed, at least for now, and Adeleke has signed up to race over 200m at both Athlos meetings in London (September 18) and New York (October 2). There will be other events before then. “Things have changed now with my performance here,” she said.

Come what may, Adeleke intends to carry a fresh perspective going forward, one she’s gleaned from two years of struggles that she hopes are now behind her.

“I’m just enjoying the journey,” she said.