It’s easy to look back now and see all the different hallmarks that made it such a stellar year for Kate O’Connor. How her ability to repeatedly go faster, higher, stronger – indoors and then outdoors – won her the perfect set of four medals from her four championship appearances.
Each time O’Connor wrote yet more Irish multi-event history, and each time her performances were driven by her innate sense and realisation that medal chances on the major championship stage do not come around very often.
But part of the beauty and essence of any multi-event discipline is the fact that fortunes and failures are so easily flipped, and perhaps O’Connor’s greatest asset throughout the year was her own calm mindset. Despite the rising expectation and at times physical and mental stress, central to the medal success was her understanding to never look beyond any event immediately in front of her.
The week before winning her bronze medal at the European Indoor Championships in Apeldoorn, O’Connor also spoke about the pivotal importance of staying injury-free. That was already proving the difference as she built on last year’s progress, when she became the first Irish Olympian to compete in the heptathlon, finishing 14th.
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“I think the biggest change was not just changing my mindset, but changing the mindset of the team around me,” O’Connor said at that point, referring to her father and coach Michael, who has helped carefully nurture her career ever since she first joined St Gerard’s athletic club in Dundalk at 13.
“Everyone around me is now working towards getting me on that podium. It’s not just my goal, its everyone’s goal.”
O’Connor reflected that in the way she ran her final event in Apeldoorn, the 800m, having slipped back into fourth after her previous effort in the long jump. Going for 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.
It brought her five-event tally to 4,781 points, smashing her Irish record of 4,683 she’d set in February, putting her safely into the bronze medal position – the first Irish athlete to make the podium in a senior multi-event discipline. No wonder O’Connor celebrated that as if it was gold.
Then just 12 days later, and some 5,300 miles apart, O’Connor went to the World Indoor Championships in Nanjing, China and demonstrated another of her star qualities: her ability to enjoy herself on the major stage.
“The opportunities, when in shape, don’t come around too often,” O’Connor said. “So why not go out while you’re enjoying it, while you’re healthy, and grab everything?”
Relishing once more her chance to be hunting rather than hunted, O’Connor rose to that challenge in familiar style, elevating herself into the silver medal position after beating Taliyah Brooks from the US by five seconds in the 800m.
“I kept saying to myself, ‘How much do you want this medal?’” said O’Connor. “She [Brooks] wasn’t ever going to get past me; there was no way that was happening.”
That merely reflected her unbridled ambition. When she won the heptathlon silver medal at the European Under-20 Championships in Boras, Sweden, back in 2019, it may have been one small step for Irish athletics, but it was one giant leap for O’Connor.
She’d also endured enough setbacks to understand the work that had gone into winning those medals. She’d narrowly missed out on qualification for the delayed Tokyo Olympics in 2021 after suffering a stress fracture in her foot. After regaining fitness to win silver for Northern Ireland at the 2022 Commonwealth Games, she was forced to withdraw from the European Championships a few weeks later, again because of a foot injury.
[ Kate O’Connor: The making of a world heptathlon medal winnerOpens in new window ]
She’s also been careful to put herself in the best training environment. After winning silver in Boras back in 2019, she was offered the chance to attend the University of Texas, where the career of Rhasidat Adeleke went soaring. But ultimately O’Connor decided to base herself at home, with Tom Reynolds (hurdles) and Dave Sweeney (javelin) also playing a key coaching role.
For the last couple of years, she’s divided her time between Dundalk and Belfast, where she’s just completed her MA in Communications and Public Relations at Ulster University.
The question of whether O’Connor could maintain her spectacular run of form into the seven-event heptathlon outdoors was promptly answered when she won the gold medal at the World University Games in the Rhine-Ruhr, Germany, improving her Irish record to 6,487 points.
So began whispers of a possible medal challenge at the World Championships in Tokyo, only this time against rising US star Anna Hall, Belgium’s three-time Olympic champion Nafi Thiam, and Britain’s reigning world champion, Katarina Johnson-Thompson.
Little was known, however, about the Achilles tendon strain she’d been nursing in the build-up to the World University Games. It was only after some final training at the Irish holding camp in Hong Kong, alongside Irish 100m hurdles record holder Sarah Lavin, that O’Connor knew she was ready to rock Japan’s National Stadium.
After improving her hurdles best to 13.44 seconds in her first event, she also recorded bests in the high jump (1.86m) and 200m (24.07), leaving her in the silver medal position after day one.
She then dropped back to fourth after the long jump on the morning of day two, straining her right knee in the process. Undeterred, she threw another lifetime best of 53.06m in the javelin, moving her back up to second place.
[ Kate O’Connor named Irish Times/Sport Ireland Sportswoman of the Year for 2025Opens in new window ]
Despite the now clear and present danger of worsening her injured knee, O’Connor’s final response was to calmly refocus, then summon all her steely grit to run 2:09.56 in the 800m, finishing on another Irish record of 6,714 points, earning her silver medal spot on the podium.
“I have a team around me and they don’t just support me as an athlete, they love me as a person,” she said. “There’s times my mind is full of doubt but with people like that around, they fill you with what you need to be filled with.”
Long may the medal-winning results continue.
