It was way back in the dim and distant past of 2009 that Ciara Mageean won her first Sportswoman of the Month award, so it seems impossible that when she celebrates her birthday this Saturday there will only be 24 candles on the cake.
It’s a measure, then, of just how youthful the runner from Portaferry, Co Down was when she first burst on to the stage, breaking Sonia O’Sullivan’s 22 year-old national junior 800m record at the Irish Schools Championships in 2009, winning silver at the World Youth Championships that year in the same distance and gold at the European Youth Olympics in the 1,500 metres.
And a year later, the then 18-year-old Mageean was back on our roll of honour when she won silver at the World Junior Championships in Canada, making her the first Irish athlete to win a track medal at the event. Also in 2010, she reached the final of the 1500m at the Commonwealth Games, in what was her first major senior championship. And in between it all, for fear of feeling idle, she captained Portaferry’s minor camogie team to victory in the Down County Championships.
It was a blizzard of sporting success, then, for Mageean, but her progress, in her first full season as a senior in 2012, was interrupted by an ankle injury, later diagnosed as ankle bursitis, the runner requiring surgery and lengthy rehabilitation programmes.
Since her return, Mageean has been steadily working towards regaining her earlier form, and 2016, under the guidance of Jerry Kiernan, has already proved hugely encouraging with two Irish indoor records in February alone, one 16 years old, the other seven.
Mageean, in the final year of her physiotherapy degree in UCD, knocked over three seconds off Sinead Delahunty’s previous Irish indoor record for the 1,500m at the Karlsruhe International meeting in Germany, and then broke Roisin McGettigan’s Irish indoor mile record at the Millrose Games in New York with a time of 4 minutes, 28.4 seconds.
Qualification for the Olympics is already secured, so there’s an exciting year ahead. “Still some work to do, but 2016 is shaping up nicely,” she said. It is too.
