Part of the beauty and essence of any multi-event discipline such as the pentathlon is the fact that fortunes and failures are easily flipped. And among the other driving forces behind Kate O’Connor in Apeldoorn on Sunday – and there were many – was her sense and realisation that medal chances on the big stage do not come around very often.
O’Connor reflected that in the way she ran her final event, the 800m, at the European Indoor Championships, having slipped back into fourth after her previous efforts in the long jump. Going for the proverbial broke, she powered off the front with one lap to go to ensure enough seconds were gained on Britain’s Jade O’Dowda, winning the event outright in 2:11.42, and the rest is Irish athletics history.
It brought the 24-year-old’s five-event tally to 4,781 points, smashing her Irish record of 4,683 set last month, putting her safely into the bronze medal position – the first Irish athlete to make the podium in a senior multi-event discipline. No wonder she celebrated as if it was gold.
O’Connor knows that given the very nature of her event she will never get the same exposure or opportunity as most other track and field athletes, who can enjoy far more competitions over the course of the season, indoors and outdoors, sometimes twice in the same meeting. She also knows that by the same nature, injuries are far more common, the risk always multiplied and with that far more likely to halt her in her tracks.
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In giving that 800m her absolute all, tearing up her pre-race plan midway through, O’Connor also rounded off the most blissful 36 minutes for Irish athletics following Sarah Healy’s gold in the 3,000m and Mark English’s bronze in the 800m. As it turned out, O’Connor’s performance on Sunday also sealed her qualification for the pentathlon at the World Indoor Championships in Nanjing, China in just under two weeks, set for March 21st-23rd.
Healy and English were already assured of their qualification for Nanjing and went straight from Apeldoorn to Dubai for some pre-event training. O’Connor ended up ranked eighth of the 14 women qualified for the pentathlon.
These World Indoor Championships are a sort of bonus competition in 2025: Nanjing, the capital of China’s eastern Jiangsu province, was originally due to host them in 2020, then in 2021, and then again in 2023, only all these dates were cancelled due to Covid-19 regulations in China.
The week before Apeldoorn, O’Connor spoke about the importance of staying fit and healthy when it comes to any multi-event, and that was already proving the difference in her this season as she builds on last year’s progress when she became the first Irish Olympian to compete in the heptathlon, the outdoor seven-event discipline, finishing 14th.
“I’ve had a nice solid run of training,” she said. “This is my first indoors now in two years, and normally I’m injured at some stage, that messes up the training, then it’s all about getting back. Whereas I’ve just had a nice run into Paris, and coming out of Paris, and I’ve just been training really well, training quite smartly. And just doing what we need to do, to get into that place we want to be.
“So even just my mindset taking a step forward, thinking that if I’m going to do this, I’m going to do it properly, and I’ve had that mindset since September, since we started back. I’m seeing a lot of rewards from it, so those, and a little bit of a mindset change.”
After her success on Sunday, O’Connor also pointed to that change in the mindset of her coaches, including her father Michael, who has helped carefully nurture her career ever since she first joined St Gerard’s athletic club in Dundalk at 13.
“With the multi-events, there are a lot of injuries that are involved,” she said. “And it’s something we’ve learned over the years. It’s who can stay injury-free for the longest, that’s who ends up coming out on top.
“We’ve really tried to put a main emphasis on ‘stay fit, stay healthy’, and just work as hard as we can, but work hard and smart. We’ve had a really good run over the last couple of months, and I suppose this weekend has shown what we’re working on.”
O’Connor has certainly fallen victim to injury setbacks before, narrowly missing out on qualification for the delayed Tokyo Olympics in 2021 after suffering a stress fracture in her foot. After regaining full fitness to win silver for Northern Ireland at the 2022 Commonwealth Games in Birmingham, she was forced to withdraw from the European Championships a few weeks later, again because of a foot injury.
She’s always been careful to put herself in the best training environment. After winning silver in the heptathlon at the European Athletics Under-20 Championships in Boras, Sweden back in 2019, she was offered the chance to attend the University of Texas, where the career of Rhasidat Adeleke went soaring, only she opted instead for Sheffield Hallam University.
After the first Covid lockdown in March 2020, she returned to her home training environment for good, knowing that works best for her, and she’s currently dividing her time between Dundalk and Belfast, where she’s completing a Master’s in Communications and Public Relations at Ulster University.
Sunday’s bronze medal was won on the back of four personal bests in the five events – the 60m hurdles, high jump, long jump and 800m – and once she can stay injury-free, O’Connor’s move back to the heptathlon this summer promises even more.
