Rhasidat Adeleke, Nick Griggs and Cathal Doyle turned in the top performances by Irish athletes over the weekend as the clock ticks down to the Olympic Games. Unfortunately only two of them will be pulling on their spikes when the athletics action starts on 1 August.
Rhasidat Adeleke showed she is rounding nicely into medal-winning form form with a smooth victory in the Monaco Diamond League. The Tallaght athlete easily saw off the challenge of a strong international field to come home in 49.17 seconds, the second fastest time of her career and inferior only to her national record of 49.07 at the European Athletics Championships in Rome last month.
Adeleke was quickly out of the blocks and led as the field entered the backstraight. Lieke Klaver from the Netherlands worked hard over the next 200 metres to close the gap to a metre as the two women entered the final 100 straight well ahead of the opposition.
It was nip and tuck for a few strides before the Dutch woman was unable to sustain the momentum, allowing Adeleke to move comfortably away to win easily. The fading Klaver did hold on for second in 49.64 while Kendall Ellis who was part of the USA’s winning 4 x 400m relay team at the Tokyo 2020 Olympics claimed third in 50.39 seconds.
Less encouraging was the performance of Ciara Mageean in the 2000m race. The extra distance should have suited Mageean but after being relatively prominent in the early stages she slipped back to finish well out of contention in tenth with a 5:43.06 timing. That was well outside Sonia O’Sullivan’s national record of 5:25.36 that was also the world best until relatively recently.
“I wasn’t happy with that performance out there and I feel like after Europeans I just haven’t been able to kick back in,” said Mageean immediately after the race. “So I’m hoping all these races are a stepping stone in the training towards the Olympic Games. So I’m out there just trying to trust the process but obviously I’m disappointed that it’s not the performance I wanted.”
Jessica Hull, emboldened by an Australian record over 1500m a few days earlier, stuck to a schedule of 64 seconds per lap to come home in a new world record of 5:19.70. Britain’s Melissa Courtney-Bryant was runner-up in 5:26.08 with Kenya’s Edinah Jebitok in 5:26.09.
It is maybe a case of what might have been for Tyrone teenager Nick Griggs who set another Northern Ireland and Irish U23 5000m record at the Morton Games in Dublin. The 19-year-old finished less than a second behind Kenyan Amos Langat in a superb time of 13:13.07.
That was over 23 seconds improvement on his previous personal best and moved him to sixth on the Irish all-time list, ahead of illustrious athletes such as John Doherty, John Treacy and 1983 world champion Eamonn Coghlan.
It also took four seconds off Darragh McElhinney’s national U23 record and bettered Dermot Donnelly’s 26-year-old NI mark by almost 15 seconds. It was Griggs’s second similar record of records in the week after new 3000m marks in Cork three nights earlier.
The Candour TC athlete may possibly wonder if he should have sought Olympic qualification at that distance instead of 1500m. The man who took the final 1500m place for Paris, Cathal Doyle, scored an impressive win in the Morton Mile. The Clonliffe Harrier used his lethal kick to overhaul American Sam Prakel in the final metres for a victory in 3:52.06. Brian Fay who runs the 5000m at Olympic Games clocked 3:52.41 in third place.