O'Connor and Adeleke preparing to hit the ground running in LA
Olympians Rhasidat Adeleke and Kate O'Connor at Venice Beach in Los Angeles, California, United States. Pic: David Fitzgerald/Sportsfile
Kate O’Connor was mid-session at the famous Mt San Antonio College running school, home to the eponymous relays that have featured well north of 140 Olympians down the years, when the Californian weather prompted a rethink.
“I felt like I was in an oven, and it's October,” O’Connor explained from Los Angeles.
The 2028 Olympics, to be held in the last two weeks in July, will be hotter again so the chance to experience first-hand what awaits Ireland’s multi-event specialist has been used assiduously as she plots her way from here to there.
The pair of golds O’Connor won at this summer’s Commonwealth Games and European Championships brought to seven the number of major senior medals she has won, six of them in the last two seasons, but the big ‘Games’ loom large.
Two of her main competitors are American. Anna Hall-Slayton is ranked number one in the world in the heptathlon.
Taliyah Brooks is fifth, four rungs down from the Irishwoman who is mindful of their home advantage as she gets the lay of the land on the West Coast.
O’Connor has been Stateside with Rhasidat Adeleke and the Paralympic pair of Orla Comerford and Tiarnan O’Donnell and they’ve taken in the Coliseum, what will be the Olympic village, Venice Beach and other sporting and cultural sights.
Paris in 2024 was her first Games. It came on the back of a difficult year when she ruptured two ligaments in her ankle and had a flaring of the tibula and fibula. She finished 14th on 6167 points. Not bad for an athlete who couldn’t walk for months before it.
She enjoyed every second of it - the buzz, the village, the competition – but came away unsatisfied and pointing the finger at her father Michael and her other coaches before a bout of reflection that led to a multiple of micro-changes.
Nutrition, sleep, recovery, training: everything was improved. Paris was her turning point.
“The difference is that my mindset has changed, and I'm no longer just making the championship. I want to be on the podium. I'll do everything in my power to get there between now and then and a big part of that is staying injury-free.”
O’Connor set a personal best of 6,751 points at the Europeans but she aims to crest 1.90m in the high jump, replicate her best javelin throws from practise on game day and nail a shot putt that was iffy in 2026. Hall-Slayton’s PB of 7,032 is emblazoned on her mind.
“I think I have a lot of scope for improvement. I don't feel like I've reached my ceiling at all. I don't know where my ceiling is, and that's what a lot of my coaches say. We're still trial and testing and pushing.”
Adeleke, unlike O’Connor, was no stranger to LA. She has raced in 13 of America’s 50 States. Her CV is a roll call of evocative names in faraway places. From Gainesville, Florida to Sacramento, California. Baton Rouge in Louisiana to Eugene, Oregon.
But even she could feel a frisson of excitement as the Irish contingent visited the Coliseum last week. A four-time European silver medallist, she couldn’t help but imagine the usual contingent of green-clad Irish fans in the historic bowl in two years’ time.
The Dubliner is still now digesting a season that was tortured by injury and looked like being a write-off before a late switch from the 400m to the 200m that brought her a silver in that 200m final in the English midlands.
It begs the question: which distance is the focus going forward?
“The four is still my main goal, but the two has shown there is a possibility for the two, but it's all about timing. We’ll see how it plays out. You just never know. The season can be unpredictable sometimes. You can set out to do one thing and one event, and then things can change.”
Adeleke’s European success came on the back of what was a restorative spell back home in Ireland, and at the Sport Ireland Institute where she worked with strength and conditioning coach Martina McCarthy and physio Ciara McCallion.
She was fulsome in her praise of both women at the time and aims to continue working with them, but the main base of operations continues to be Texas where she returned for off-season training after the fact-finding mission in LA.
A lost voice limited her chat from LA but her response to a question on whether she was going back to the same training environment – which would be under coach Edrick Floreal – with no changes at all, was succinct.
“Yeah,” she said.
Whatever changes and stays the same, Adeleke appears determined to approach the next two years and more with a very different attitude. She has come to realise the importance of down time and family time, and of mental breaks.
The mantra now is to work smarter rather than harder.
“We’re going to take things back to basics where we're going to focus on what works and the quality of the work. And also making sure I’m living a full life that I can enjoy and have fun and have time to breathe.
“And when I do come back to the track, and when I do go to train, I'm in the best position to give my full 100% effort, and just not experience any burnouts again.”
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