CIARA Mageean doesn’t do small talk. The recent cold snap would get a good airing if conversation went that way. Mike Tyson v Jake Paul? Probably. Hurling? Camogie? Strap yourself in.
Full of life, full of chat. Bubbly, in the best possible sense of the word; despite a sporting career played out in the public eye, these are the associations we have made with the Portaferry woman before the track even comes into view.
After the summer, though, Ciara Mageean didn’t want to talk. Didn’t want to see anybody except those closest.
Despite all the ups and downs the years have brought, and there have been plenty, nothing comes close to pulling out of the Paris Olympics on the eve of the 1500m competition in which she harboured genuine medal hopes.
Her Achilles heel was her Achilles heel, but what was left wasn’t pain, necessarily - not the way other setbacks have sent her spinning. This was something entirely different. Something deeper. Darker.
Because Paris was her time. Rio eight years earlier was a steep learning curve, Tokyo saw preparations beset by a torn calf suffered in the build-up. And then boom.
Within a month in 2022 Mageean won Commonwealth Games and European silver medals. A few weeks later she broke the four-minute barrier for the first time – taking Sonia O’Sullivan’s Irish record that has stood since 1995 – when claiming her first Diamond League win.
A year later, she ran the race of her life to finish fourth in the World Championships in Doha. And then came the moment to top them all – June 9, Rome, “I didn’t grow up playing camogie to get boxed in”. You know the story.
Trailing Jemma Reekie and Georgie Bell heading down the straight, Mageean cut loose with 90 metres left, barged between the British pair to grab gold in the most glorious manner imaginable.
Households shook back home as the line was crossed, that familiar coat-hanger smile beaming out from television screens up and down the country, a ‘Reeling in the Years’ moment in the making.
The trajectory couldn’t have been better. The 32-year-old’s form, this incredible Indian summer, timed to perfection. But, 10 years after undergoing potentially career-threatening surgery on her left Achilles, the right had slowly but surely picked up the baton.
It was nagging at her, gnawing away, and not just now.
“I think I am just really unlucky that genetically, I clearly have bone spurs in the back of my heels.
“I realise it is probably something I couldn’t have done anything about, it was always going to appear. And so for a large number of years, I have been dealing with pain in my right ankle.
“I think people wondered was it something that happened this summer and what did you do to make that happen? Unfortunately, people don’t realise I have been running in pain for a long time, I have been managing this ankle for eight-plus years.”
Mageean spoke with a consultant in St Moritz back in 2019 when the pain was impacting her training. He knew she needed surgery, but he also knew she was running too well for that to happen any time soon.
She was warned earlier this year that her ankle was a ticking timebomb. The plan was to get the Olympics under way, then go under the knife; be back, good as new, for the season ahead.
Then the bomb went off.
“My last training session before the Games, for no reason in the last rep, it gave me an extra little bit of pain.
“I was lucky enough that my sports psych was there with me, Kate Kirby, my boyfriend Thomas [Moran] and my friend, Jip Vastenburg, who really helped me through the summer.
“I finished the rep, was dragged up off the track and I was like ‘the ankle is a bit sore’. And she said: ‘It always is’. It was sore the week before and she helped me through my cool-down – ‘we will only do 10 minutes and then we will get it iced’.
“I was sitting having my lunch in this lovely little town, Caneva, with peas tied around my ankle, and I just said ‘something is a little bit sorer this time…’”
An MRI shed no further light, other than the carnage they already knew existed. So Mageean flew to Paris, went into the athletes’ village, got two cortisone injections and hoped for the best.
“Look, these are the injections that were always on the cards… I wasn’t given them previously because the risks were too high.
“A week out from the Olympic Games, you take those chances.”
However, rumblings were starting to make their way out of the Irish camp that all was not well. Mageean had played no part in any of the Olympic media build-up - unusual for such a high-profile athlete. Talk swirled around that she had split from coach Helen Clitheroe.
When she wasn’t, as rumoured, named as one of the Irish flagbearers, alarm bells sounded – and then the news broke, a Wednesday evening in Paris, and prayers that had gone unanswered.
“Unfortunately it was no longer an issue of me overcoming pain - the function in my ankle was affected because I couldn’t toe off. I was trying to stride and put my foot down and it was just flat.
“I was telling myself it was fine, my team was asking me how was it, and I was saying it was fine. I ran a 32 second 200, and Thomas said ‘can you give me a 28?’”
But that all she had – flat out, running on one foot.
“A 28 second 200 would usually be bread and butter for me, especially going into championships. It was no longer an issue of going out and trying to do my best out there - I had to admit that I couldn’t even make myself around a 1500m track like this.”
And this is the thing. As much as she wanted to make it to the line, wanted to become a three-time Olympian, Mageean had gone long past the point of being there just to compete; she was in Paris to challenge for a place on the podium. To fulfil her dream of bringing an Olympic medal back to Portaferry.
When that was off the table, there was nowhere left to turn.
“That was the hardest decision I ever had to make…”
She cried. Thomas cried. Phone calls were made back home. More tears.
Then she disappeared, went off grid. Radio silence for the girl who could talk for Ireland. Mageean moved into a hotel away from the village, as much for the sake of her Irish team-mates as herself.
“I didn’t them to have to worry about what the hell to say to me because they are in a really focused place, and it is tough for them to chat with somebody who is having a really hard time.
“I was really fortunate to meet Rhys [McClenaghan], and he is from 30 minutes up the road from me and I was really overjoyed to see him get his gold medal.
“So to give him a hug, tell him how proud I was for him and that I am so excited for him from that little small peninsula of Ards that we have come from and getting to bring a gold medal home.
“And Rhys was saying he was so sorry and I was saying it’s okay, don’t say anything, its fine. Enjoy and bask in your glory because I will process what I need to process.
“No matter what anyone says, it won’t make a difference to me.”
And so it proved, the days that followed in one of the most beautiful cities in the world, in the midst of the greatest show on earth, barely more than a blur three months down the line.
“Sport is a little microcosm of life - you experience all the emotions other people get throughout their lives all in one little season, or one little sporting career.
“There’s been a few moments in my life where I’ve felt sheer grief and loss - the loss of my grandmother when I was at university… she died far too young.
“Whenever Jerry [Kiernan] passed away and I was in Manchester, I wasn’t at home and I hadn’t really had as much of a connection as I always wanted to have. I thought I’d come home and have Jerry the rest of my life.
“It always feels kind of crass to compare sport to that, but it quite often gives you the same emotions. It was grief to have the loss of a dream. It’s my life’s work and it’s everything that I’ve put all of my energy into, but also all of those people around me have put their lives and things on pause and on hold to pursue my dreams.
“Having to come to that realisation really quickly, and so publicly, to have to feel that you need to talk about it... it’s probably one of the reasons why I needed a little bit of gap and a bit of space because I couldn’t have coherently put a sentence together to tell you remotely how I felt.
“I’ll be honest, I didn’t know how I felt. I just felt numb. It wasn’t even sadness, it was just emptiness. I didn’t know how to feel.”
Now she does. Well, sort of. It’s still raw in a way. There are still tears, even as she talks in Santry’s Crowne Plaza Hotel, hours before a celebration of the best of Irish athletics – including her own unforgettable night inside Stadio Olimpico - takes place in the ballroom below.
But Mageean’s toughness, and resilience, will come as news to nobody.
Grimaces greeted word of her withdrawal because, straight away, people look at her age, add four years, and try to figure out whether 2028 in Los Angeles is truly feasible.
As they stood outside a cathedral in Paris, dad Chris threw his arm around her. The load carried has not just been hers, she knows that. But retire? In these circumstances? On terms that weren’t her own?
Not even an option.
“My daddy was like ‘right we’ll call it a day - you come home, you go watch the hurling with me, you can get a dog finally, and be done with all this’,” she smiles.
“My family have had a really hard time, and I know Thomas has, and my close friends - not by seeing how much it has broken me physically, but just how much mentally it’s brought me to really low places.
“And much to my father’s dismay maybe – no, I know he’ll be delighted - I said ‘what are you talking about, I’m not retiring yet, there’s another Olympics in four years’ time’. I’ve only gotten faster over the past few years… how it finished has given me extra fire in my belly for this next Olympic cycle.”
She has already undergone surgery on the offending Achilles, and is currently rehabbing with a view to returning next year.
Off the track too, Mageean has started looking to the future, coming back home, basing herself in Belfast, having spent the guts of the past decade in Manchester. The Clitheroe partnership over, Mageean will forge her own path for the time being as she plans “Ciara 3.0″, and another chapter yet to be written.
“Whenever I was moving home I was like ‘you know what, I’m going to take this opportunity to build around me a team that are exactly what I need - that will nurture and guide me and that I can actually sit at the head of the table and help guide it’.
“But I need people within that who will offer me that advice. Myself and Thomas have a lot of knowledge - nobody knows me better than Thomas - but I’ve sat down with Mark Kirk who has a fantastic group in Belfast and chatted with him and I’m very keen to bring Mark on board in that team, to have as a sounding board and a mentor because he’s somebody that I’ve known for a very long time and I trust him.
“There was a moment that struck me really hard in Paris - myself and Thomas had always discussed making the change to leave Manchester, but where were we going to go?
“We were looking at all our options. Would we go to Boston? France? Spain? All these very glamorous places you could go. But when Thomas got with me he knew we were always going to be back in Ireland, and that was honestly from the get-go when we started going out in UCD.
“If he didn’t know it, he surely had to realise he was going to get dragged up north. I’ve always had that connection… home is somewhere I’ve always felt a real sense of belonging too.
“Throughout my career, my connection to home and the pride that I have in the Irish vest has been a super-power, and for me having my feet back on Irish soil will be a super-power too.”
