When towards the start of last season Rhasidat Adeleke first hinted at moving up to the 400 metres many predicted that someday she would break the 50-second barrier. Only no one predicted she would break it so easy or so soon.
Now, as if any sliver of doubt remained, Adeleke has run herself into that supreme end of world class sprinting, still only 20 and the first Irish woman to break through that barrier, clocking 49.90 seconds with another astonishing performance in her only her second outdoor race of the season.
It’s the barrier that often decides the winning of medals on the world and Olympic stage and the Dublin sprinter is unquestionably at that level now, taking almost half a second off her own Irish record set indoors just over a month ago. Another small step, one giant leap.
[ Rhasidat Adeleke smashes another Irish record as she runs world-class 200m timeOpens in new window ]
Better still it came less than 24 hours after Adeleke had dropped back down to the 200m and broke her own Irish record there too, running 22.34 seconds, everything about her progress in her third year at the University of Texas at Austin moving at record-breaking speed.
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Competing in Florida at the Tom Jones Memorial in Gainsville, Adeleke nailed second place behind Britton Wilson, who broke another American collegiate record with her 49.51 seconds, having already cracked the 50-second barrier indoors. That time would have placed her fourth in the Tokyo Olympics.
Wilson, the 22 year-old who runs for the University of Arkansas, is far more seasoned over the one-lap event, winning gold with the USA 4x400m relay at the World Championships in Oregon last summer. She certainly got the break on Adeleke around the closing bend, but Adeleke was closing on her in the end.
It’s also Adeleke’s first full season of training for the longer sprint event: after taking her outdoor best to 50.53 when finishing fifth, from lane one, in the final of the European Championships in Munich last summer, she twice improved that indoors, running 50.33 in Albuquerque, before finishing second to Wilson at the NCAA championships on the second weekend in March.
It the often futile exercise of putting times into medal-winning perspective – global championship racing is a very different environment – Adeleke’s time would have placed her fourth at those World Championships last summer, only the top three breaking 50 seconds.
It’s certainly on a par, if not surpassing, one of the other big barriers in sprinting, the 10-second barrier for the men’s 100m. Throughout the 2022 outdoor season, 26 different men broke the 10-second barrier for the 100m; throughout the same outdoor season, only nine women broke the 50-second barrier for the 400m.
Indeed it’s fast becoming a record per race for Adeleke, who on Friday evening took a similarly sizeable chunk off her own Irish 200m mark – both indoors and out, with her 22.34 seconds. With that she improved her indoor mark of 22.52, run at altitude in Albuquerque back in January, an indoor and outright Irish record – the previous fastest mark outdoors being the 22.59 she ran in April last year. There was a tailwind of 1.8m/s, inside the permitted 2.0m/s, still Adeleke tore up the track, finishing behind her University of Texas team-mate Julien Alfred, who won in 21.91.
That makes it five times she’s broken an Irish record this year, already improving her own indoor 200m mark, and now three times breaking her 400m mark. At the Texas Relays a fortnight ago, Adeleke was part of four relay quartets, all of which won, setting NCAA records in the 4x100, 4x200 and the Sprint Medley, before anchoring the 4x400m with a hand-timed split of 49.2 seconds.
Asked about her outdoor goals at that point, she said: “I just want to work harder, run faster, that’s what drives me on.”
The only Irish sprint record not in her name is the 100m mark, which belongs to Phil Healy, with the 11.28 she clocked in 2018; Adeleke ran 11.31 in 2021, and her coach at Texas, Edrick Floréal – Coach Flo – is certainly keen for Adeleke to give that a shot before the outdoor season is out.
“There’s one record she doesn’t have, the 100 metres,” he said. “And she’s bursting for that one, really wants that one. If she does, she’ll have every Irish record, from 60m, to 400m. So I promised her if we do enough quality I’ll give her the chance to run it. We just have to do it right. You can’t start doing too much speedwork too soon.”
Once she starts that real speedwork, the rest of her outdoor season can’t come soon enough, all building towards the World Championships in Budapest in August. Break 50 seconds there and anything is possible.
