This story is part of a series, The Greatest Irish Olympic Stories Never Told, which will run every Saturday in The Irish Times up to the beginning of the 2024 Olympic Games, on Friday, July 26th
By the time Mary Purcell established herself as the single most dominant force in Irish women’s athletics in the early 1970s, she had already become well used to breaking new ground – and to standing her own ground, too.
She would later become a shining light in events ranging from the 800m all the way up to the marathon, and in cross-country running as well. Over the course of her pioneering 12-year running career, she competed in two Olympics: Munich 1972 and Montreal 1976.
She competed in two events, the 800m and 1,500m. She was the first Irish woman to compete in the 1,500m, given that it was only added for the first time in 1972, and remained the longest women’s event at the Olympics until 1984.
For Purcell, nothing had seemed impossible, even when women’s distance running was still anything but fashionable, and when she was also working as a full-time pharmacist, and later rearing a young family.
She competed in two European Athletics Championships and five World Cross Country championships, and won 13 Irish titles – nine on the track, three in the country, one on the road – as well as three British titles. She also broke 12 Irish records, made 20 international appearances, and went unbeaten in Ireland from 1972 to 1976.
She was the first Irish woman athlete to experiment with altitude training, the first to insist she should be able to run against men to help better herself, and the only Irish athlete to join the US-led boycott of the 1980 Olympics in Moscow, on her own steadfast conscientious grounds following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
By that time, Purcell only had one major championship medal to show for her efforts, a European indoor bronze in the 1,500m from earlier in 1980, as her career largely coincided with the notorious systematic doping of Soviet and East German athletes, and indeed the rest of the Eastern bloc.
Mary was one of the most stubborn athletes I ever came across in my life, and also one of the most entertaining
Purcell had ultimately become so disillusioned with all things Olympic-related that staying at home from Moscow felt like her only option. She became the sole Irish athlete not to seek consideration from the Irish Olympic federation, despite achieving the necessary qualifying standards for Moscow.
She later spoke of the motivations behind her decision, telling this newspaper in 2018: “Being a pharmacist, I’d a better feel for what was going on. And to me, the drug-taking was becoming more obvious. I could have gone to Moscow in 1980, but at that stage I was getting a little disillusioned.
“I remember walking behind some of the Soviet sprinters, and you know physiological things happen when you’re on certain substances. Men become more like women, and women become more like men, the deepening of the voice, the elongation of the face, loads of little tell-tale signs.”
Born in Dublin in 1949, Purcell was 23 when she competed in her first Olympics in Munich in 1972, and although she improved her Irish 1,500m record to 4:16.43, she finished sixth in her heat, unable to progress.
That first Olympic experience was also marred by the massacre of 11 Israeli coaches and athletes by Palestinian militant organisation Black September, following their kidnapping inside the Olympic village.
Four years later in Montreal, Purcell ran another Irish 1,500m record and personal best of 4:08.63 in the Olympics, but finished fifth in her heat, failing to progress against the increasingly dominant Soviets and East Germans.
“I just said to myself, ‘What the hell is going on here?’ It knocked the stuffing out of me, because you just knew. There was little testing, and the testing is only as good as the analytic methods you use.”
After missing most of the 1977 season after giving birth to her first daughter Kara, there would be no regrets about missing out on Moscow, not when the Soviet women were utterly dominating again. Tatyana Kazankina defended her 1,500m title in an Olympic record of 3:56.56, with East Germany’s Christine Wartenberg second and Nadiya Olizarenko, also of the Soviet Union, third.
By the start of those Moscow Olympics, another 66 countries had joined the US boycott, meaning only 80 countries competed. The Soviet Union topped the medal table, winning a record 80 golds, 69 silvers and 46 bronzes, followed by East Germany with 47 golds, 37 silvers and 42 bronzes; the next best country was Bulgaria, with eight golds, 16 silvers and 17 bronzes.
Despite the suspicions around the Soviet and East German athletes at time, there wasn’t a single positive doping test at those Moscow Olympics, in any sport.
Purcell had made her running breakthrough as Mary Tracey, at the age of 21, despite being a hockey player with a background in athletics. She was already into her pharmacy studies at UCD, the family still running the well-known pharmacy on Dublin’s Eden Quay.
Although originally inspired by the Mexico Olympics of 1968, Purcell never held any great ambition to reach that stage until, by chance, it opened up before her.
You still had to go home and cook the dinner, go to work the next day, getting on with the business of making a living. That’s just my personality, I always wanted to do better, be better
“I remember watching the 1968 Olympics on the TV, and thinking ‘Ah, well that’s too late for me now’, because then I went to college and studied pharmacy. With myself, with the hockey, one match didn’t go well, and they decided to drop people en masse. I was just looking around and happened to bump into Peter Purcell, and he suggested I try athletics. He became my coach, then my husband, and that’s how it started.”
Purcell was part of the old Guinness Athletics Club, which she promptly joined, and quickly turned heads. In her first proper track season in 1972, she ran 2:04.2 for 800m, and with that found herself Munich-bound.
Even from those early running days, Purcell did not like being told when or how or indeed against who she could race. Another of her ground-breaking runs came in 1978 at the UCD track in Belfield when, to the consternation of officials, she lined out in a men’s 5,000m, dropping out at 3,000m with a time of 8:51.4 – the then fastest ever by an Irish woman over this “new” distance.
“I never really thought about what I was achieving,” she recalled. “People might say ‘You’re great to be doing this’, but you still had to go home and cook the dinner, go to work the next day, getting on with the business of making a living. That’s just my personality, I always wanted to do better, be better.”
What also set Purcell apart was her willingness to try anything which might help get more out of herself, such as altitude training at St Moritz when that was still a novelty, and later running 130 miles a week, including 30-mile runs over the Dublin Mountains.
I just said to myself, ‘What the hell is going on here?’ It knocked the stuffing out of me, because you just knew
To this day, for anyone who knew Purcell, her decision to boycott those Moscow Games on her own conscientious grounds came as no surprise.
“Mary was one of the most stubborn athletes I ever came across in my life, and also one of the most entertaining,” said her former training partner Lindie Naughton, now an author and athletics journalist. “I was there in Belfield the night she insisted on running 3,000m of a 5,000m men’s race at a graded meet. The ‘heedyins’ of Dublin Board were going nuts!”.
After Moscow, Purcell gave birth to her second daughter, Jan. By now working full-time at her own pharmacy business, she moved briefly up to the marathon, winning the Irish title in 1982, and then winning the fourth edition of the Dublin Marathon in 1983. After that, she retired from all competitive running.
Purcell is now 75, and home for her since 1993 has been Douglas on the Isle of Man, where she started up SEQ, a regulatory affairs consultancy for the pharmacy industry.
Plenty of Irish women have run faster, and won more medals, but Purcell unquestionably helped to show them the way. And to this day, she still remains the only Irish athlete to stand up for what she truly believed in when it came to the Olympics.
Olympics 2024: The key events for Irish viewers
Women in the Olympics: A complicated history
“An Olympiad with females would be impractical, uninteresting, un-aesthetic and improper.”- Baron de Coubertin
In the beginning there were none at all. When Charles Pierre de Frédy, latter Baron de Coubertin, revived the first modern Olympic Games in Athens in 1896, he deliberately maintained the condition only men could compete.
Change would come slowly. When in 1900 the second Games were staged in his native Paris, Coubertin somewhat relented, and 22 women took part, in five sports – tennis, golf, sailing, croquet and equestrian – along with 1,096 men. Just under two per cent of the total athlete participation, which included the first women’s gold medal winner in British tennis player Charlotte Cooper.
Roll on another 124 years, and with the Games now returning to Paris for the third time, for the first time in Olympic history that gender balance will be an equal 50-50. Of the around 10,500 athletes set to compete, they’ll be more or less evenly split, between men and women, including the now 20 mixed-gender medal events.
When Ireland first competed in the Olympics as an independent Free State, also in Paris in 1924, the team of 48 athletes included only two women, Phoebe Blair-White and Hilda Wallis playing in the women’s tennis singles, doubles, and mixed doubles.
Women made up under two per cent of the 1900 Olympic Games’ total athlete participation, which included the first women’s gold medal winner in British tennis player Charlotte Cooper
If you follow that trail over the 100 years since, among the true pioneers on the Olympic stage were Dorothy ‘Tommy’ Dermody, the Olympic fencer in London in 1948, and the first woman to compete in the Games since the Irish Free State became the Irish Republic.
Dermody lived to the age of 102, and by coincidence also taught PE at Alexandra College in Dublin to a young Kilkenny student named Maeve Shankey – in 1956 as Maeve Kyle, she became the first Irish woman to compete in the Olympics athletics programme. She ran in Melbourne in both the 100m and 200m, which at that time were the longest track events open to women. Kyle’s speciality distance was the 400m, but women weren’t allowed compete at this distance until 1964.
The distances have gone gradually up since. The 1,500m was added for the 1972 Games, and it was only in 1984 that women were allowed run the marathon for the first time.
At the time of the Melbourne games, Kyle was 28 years old, married and had a with a two-year-old daughter. She has often proudly recalled the story of how the news of her selection for Melbourne was greeted, perhaps best surmised in a letter printed in this newspaper.
“I was a disgrace to motherhood and the Irish nation. That’s what one letter in The Irish Times said. Imagine! A woman leaving her husband and daughter to go and run!”
