On a scorching hot Sunday morning in Paris, under the thin shadow of the Eiffel Tower, in the last athletics event of the 2024 Olympics, Fionnuala McCormack finished the women’s marathon in 28th position, and with that made Irish sporting history.
No Irish woman had competed in five Olympic Games before, and for McCormack, the mother of three daughters, who turns 40 next month, and is coached by her husband Alan, this was not only about the taking part. She gave it her absolute all, same as she has always done, since running in her first Olympics in Beijing 16 years ago.
For the first time in Olympic history, the women’s marathon was scheduled as the last athletics event, that climax in part to recognise the historic women’s march on Versailles, in 1789, at the start of the French Revolution.
It followed that same route out to Versailles, then back to Les Invalides in the heart Paris, taking in some hills along the way back which McCormack described as “torture”, as well she might.
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“At least I’m still alive,” she said.
Her time was 2:30.12, excellent given the course and the conditions, and yet McCormack was not entirely satisfied about that. But the Wicklow athlete was being hard on herself, having moved up from 47th place at 10km, to finish inside the top 30 of the 79 women who finished.
“I actually liked the first hill,” she said. “The second hill was torture, and girls did actually walk up it in front of me. They stopped for a bit, yeah.
“Right now, I’d rate that as the most difficult. Sapporo [Japan] was probably hotter I think, but the course was a lot tougher here. But it was more interesting. So it was better.
“Except then you were coming back in and you could see the Eiffel Tower, and you were like ‘that looks way too far away’, I wish I was closer. I really focused on the downhills because that’s where I tend to drift. I probably passed as many people on the downhill as I did on the uphill. The flat was what got me. But I would have definitely preferred to have been more in the race instead of just surviving it.”
Her husband Alan is in Paris, their three daughters, Isla (one), Isabella (three), and Naomi (five), were watching from home in Wicklow.
In a suitably historic race for the podium, Sifan Hassan became the first women to win three Olympic medals in three distance running events at the same Games, the Dutch star winning in an Olympic record of 2:22:55.
Hassan had already won 5,000m and 10,000m bronze medals in Paris, and kicked past Ethiopia’s Tigist Assefa in a sprint finish; Assefa secured silver in 2:22:58, while bronze went to Kenya’s Hellen Obiri in a personal best of 2:23:10.
McCormack had already competed in four different Olympic events, the 3,000m steeplechase in Beijing 2008, the 5,000m and 10,000m in London 2012, then the marathon in Rio 2016 (finishing 20th) and the delayed Tokyo Olympics in 2021 (finishing 25th).
There is no talk of retiring yet: “I’m just waiting for Seb Coe to put the cross-country into the Winter Olympics,” she said with a smile, referring to the World Athletics president and his hopes of adding cross-country to the Winter Olympics.
“But I’m not going to stop running. I’m not sure I’ll ever do that so. Obviously I’ll have to think about what I do next. I don’t think I’d want to end on that.
“I didn’t want to be just a participant in five Olympics, I want to be a performer. And I don’t think I did that today, so that’s disappointing.
“I know it’s not easy to go to five Olympics, and to be fit and not injured. The Olympics is the pinnacle of our sport and to be able to focus on that, it’s great to be able to do I suppose. It’s great to have the three girls to go back to now, and they don’t care how I performed.”
