CMAT and London Fashion Week: Kate O'Connor on a life less ordinary
SPAR and EUROSPAR Team Ireland ambassador and multi-event athlete Kate O'Connor, pictured today at Lawlor’s Hotel in Naas for the SPAR and EUROSPAR Community Fund presentation lunch. Pic: ©INPHO/Ben Brady
It took a close friend's words at Electric Picnic for Kate O'Connor to really understand that she lives a life less normal.
O’Connor had brought her friend Aoife along to the Stradbally festival after an extraordinary summer that had seen her win Commonwealth Games gold and then become European champion in the heptathlon.
Those sorts of achievements have opened doors for the 25-year-old but meeting the great and the good of the sporting world and beyond on the back of her success hadn't really hit home until what happened at EP.
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"I feel like sometimes when you come off like such a high moment, a huge successful experience, sometimes life can feel like a little bit of a blur for a couple of weeks afterwards," O'Connor admitted.
"I'll meet like all these really cool people and I'll have really great conversations that so many people would be like, 'I can't believe you've just spoken to them'. And it kind of happens and you almost move on from it and it rolls into the next thing."
The pair were set up in the glamping section at EP and there was an invitation to go side of stage for Lola Young. Urged by Aoife to take up the invite, they watched her performance with CMAT standing beside them.
Aoife was thrilled to meet her hero and later that day, put the experience in perspective.
“She said to me, ‘You don’t understand, I will never do anything like this again in my life. You will, but I’ll never do anything like this,’” O’Connor recalled.
“She was like, ‘Thank you so much for taking me.’ It was the first time that somebody close to me had ever looked at me and basically said, ‘Your life isn’t normal - seriously, it’s not normal’.
“And I probably don’t realise it, but in that moment, she just made me re-check myself and go, ‘What’s going on here? Not everybody gets to experience something like this.’”
It is a revealing moment for the 25-year-old, and there have been a few of them recently, such as experiencing London Fashion Week - she believes athletics as a sport should look to adopt a more 'classy' approach to hosting events - and her trip to Croke Park for Katie Taylor’s last fight.
“To see a female athlete fill Croke Park like that, and for people to be fighting over tickets, is insane,” she reflected. “She’s done so much for women in sport and there are so many little girls who look up to her.
“She’s shown so many of us other Irish athletes that it’s possible, that Irish people are extremely talented and that if you just put in the work you can compete against the best in the world or be the best in the world.”
O’Connor left the stadium feeling proud, and also inspired. “She was someone that showed me not to be afraid to work hard and be aggressive and be competitive - and that’s all okay, to try to be the best in the world at what you’re doing.”
That ambition is central to where O’Connor now finds herself. Despite winning World Indoor bronze, Commonwealth gold and European gold in the same season, she is convinced she will improve still further.
The initial disappointment with her World Indoor medal was rooted in precisely that belief.
“Any other year I would have been completely over the moon with a bronze medal,” she reflected. “But I felt like I had so much more potential, and I was questioning, did I maybe let something slip by?”
Rather than dwell on it, she used it as fuel. The Commonwealth Games became a stepping stone before she delivered the performance required to win the European title. Rather than being satisfied, O’Connor now sees another gap to close.
“I finished 2025 feeling like I’m so excited for 2026 because I know it can get better, and I finished this year and I feel the exact same,” she said. “I think I’m building really well towards LA, and I just want to continue to get better.”
The key, she believes, is improving everywhere. “In the multi-events you need to be bulletproof on all seven events,” said the Dundalk AC star. “If you have a weak event, you leave yourself slightly open. Anna Hall doesn’t have a weak event, so I can’t really let myself have that either.”
O’Connor plans to remain largely Ireland-based, trusting the team that has helped take her to this level while gradually introducing new expertise.
“I don’t need to make a tonne of changes,” she explained. “I feel like I’m capable of so much more and there’s so much more that we can be doing ourselves on the track.
"Whatever happens, it's going to be very slow and a slow integration, and then ultimately, depending on how I feel things are going with different people, whether the relationships continue to develop. That's kind of where we're at."
After a few more weeks of enjoying life away from competition, she will return to training around the middle of October. European Indoors will be her next major target, but she also wants more individual competition, with hurdles and long jump on the wish list.
Then comes next summer’s World Championships. “That’s the big one that I would love to go and challenge for the title,” she admitted.
Beyond that lies Los Angeles. "Hopefully we'll see that I've closed the gap a significant amount with Anna," O'Connor said. "That would set me up well for the Olympics.
"I think that I'll continue to win medals once I stay healthy. That's the main name of the game."
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