Gold medal homecoming celebrations on ice for Portaferry’s Ciara Mageean

Homecoming celebrations for European athletics gold medallist Ciara Mageean have been put on hold - at least until after the summer Olympics in Paris.

Mageean (32) stormed to victory in the 1500m at the European Championships in Rome on Sunday, winning Ireland’s first individual track medal since Sonia O’Sullivan in 1998.

The highly decorated athlete will be given a hero’s welcome when she makes her eagerly anticipated trip to her Portaferry home, but her friends and family will have to wait a few more weeks to see her latest medal, which she was awarded on Monday.

When she came back to the Ards Peninsula after last summer’s World Athletics Championship, where she finished fourth, hundreds of people lined the streets, while a special reception was held in the village community centre.

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On a visit to her old primary school in 2019, she brought her medal collection to show children and tell the stories behind them. She also brought a simpler and smaller prize which she described as being “as special” - a cross country medal won while representing St Mary’s.

However, any joyous celebrations will have to wait as the Co Down athlete jumps straight back into her Olympic training. She will travel back to her base in Manchester on Tuesday and then onto St Moritz later in the summer.

Interviewed by RTE after her win on Sunday, Mageean acknowledged her background in Gaelic games as a youngster for giving her the physical edge needed to take the title.

“I didn’t grow up playing camogie to get boxed in,” she said explaining her race tactics.

Both Down GAA and Portaferry GAC were among those to offer congratulations to the gold medallist on social media, with her club sharing an image of a much younger Ciara in her blue and yellow camogie kit.

Her parents, Catherine and Christopher were accomplished hurling and camogie players.

While Ciara gave up camogie when athletics began to dominate her sporting life, they said, it remains her “first love”.

Catherine, said the family was “over the moon” with the win.

“We usually go to the European events, we are all heading to Paris for a longer time, but we opted out of this one. A part of me regrets that now,” she told the BBC.

“We were rather nervous at home, pacing up and down the room, my husband, he was doing gymnastics, jumping up and down then he runs outside, ‘yes, yes, yes’, down the street.”