This is still not easy. Downstairs, the great and good of Irish athletics are gathering for their annual awards, celebrating a year that launched track and field back into the mainstream. In a while, Ciara Mageean will go and get her gúna on and head down to be feted for the European gold she won in Rome in June. But first, Paris.
It’s still all just a bit raw. Nothing compared to what it was on that Monday in August when she had to admit defeat and pull out of the Olympic 1,500m. But still enough for her voice to catch a couple of times as we speak, for the devastation she felt to bubble briefly to the surface.
“Sport is a little microcosm of life,” she explains. “You experience all the emotions other people get throughout their lives all in one little season, or one little sporting career. There’s been a few moments in my life where I’ve felt sheer grief and loss – the loss of my grandmother when I was at university, she died far too young. Whenever Jerry [Kiernan] passed away and I was in Manchester, I wasn’t at home and I hadn’t really had as much of a connection as I always wanted to have. I thought I’d come home and have Jerry the rest of my life.
“It always feels kind of crass to compare sport to that but it quite often gives you the same emotions. It was grief. The loss of a dream. It’s my life’s work and it’s everything that I’ve put all of my energy into. But also all of those people around me have put their lives and things on pause and on hold to pursue my dreams.
“It really is a grieving cycle. It’s a loss, a loss of a dream and having to come to that realisation really quickly and so publicly, to have to feel that you need to talk about it ... it’s probably one of the reasons why I needed a little bit of gap and a bit of space because I couldn’t have coherently put a sentence together to tell you remotely how I felt. I’ll be honest, I didn’t know how I felt. I just felt numb. It wasn’t even sadness, it was just emptiness.”
The Achilles injury that caused her to pull out is something that had been in the post for a while. She reckons she hasn’t run properly pain-free in about eight years. She had surgery on her left ankle when she was 19 and has been carrying the right one for much of the time since. Essentially, it’s genetic bad luck – she has bone spurs that have been jabbing away at her Achilles all this time.
She has been considering surgery for years but the timing was never right. She was running too well to risk it, hitting too many of her targets to throw all the cards in the air and see how they’d fall in the operating theatre. So she lived with it, figuring she would see it out until Paris at least.
“I always knew it was a ticking time bomb and that it would go off eventually. I always hoped that it would be at the end of the season. I’ll be honest, I was reflecting on the season and going, ‘At the end of this summer, I’ll get the ankle sorted. I can’t keep going like this.’ But my last training session before the Games, for no reason, in the last rep, it just gave me an extra bit of pain.”
She wasn’t panicking yet. But she could feel this was different from the usual pain she had after a session. She had an MRI and it showed the same as it always shows – the whole area around her ankle was banjaxed but it was hard to distinguish what was old damage and what was new. She flew to Paris and went to the athletes’ village to meet up with the Irish medical team, desperate for something that would get her to the start line.
“I had two cortisone injections down into my ankle. You get a TUE [Therapeutic Use Exemption] from the doc so close to the Games to help you deal with the pain. But any injection with cortisone around the tendon carries its own inherent risk because it can have a degenerative effect on a tendon, particularly your Achilles, and you don’t want that as an athlete.
“The doc explained the pros and cons of this to me, giving this in the hope that it might settle it all down but we also didn’t know if it would fix it. Unfortunately, for me, it didn’t and it was no longer an issue of me overcoming pain. The function in my ankle was affected because I couldn’t toe off. I was trying to stride and put my foot down and it was just flat.”
When she tried to run, she could only do 32 seconds for 200 metres. Going into a championship, she would generally be aiming for 28. It was over.
“I had to admit to myself it was no longer an issue of going out and trying to do my best out there. I had to admit that I couldn’t even make myself get around a 1,500m track like this. I sat down with the doc the day before and said was there anything I could do? And he said no and your health is more important. And I said I don’t care! It’s the Olympic Games! But I knew if I toed the line, I wouldn’t have confidence that I would finish the race.
“And so, I came out of the office and sat in the village with Thomas [her boyfriend] and we had a discussion. I knew I had to make my mind up. I sat down and said this is my third Olympic Games and if I don’t toe the line, I am not a three-time Olympian.
“Thomas reminded me that I am not here just to show up. If I am coming to the Olympics, I am here to be competitive. I am a fourth-place finisher in the Worlds last year, I am European gold medallist. Make the decision that is best for me. So I decided to withdraw and that was the hardest decision I ever had to make.
“I was like, ‘Right I better go and tell the doc and begin whatever process needs to happen to withdraw from an Olympic Games.’ Thomas sat beside me, we had a hug and he said, ‘You’re still European gold medallist from this year, don’t forget that.’
“He said that you got your gold medal finally in Rome and Italy was a very special place for Jerry. And he said you know, maybe it’s meant to be. LA was Jerry’s Olympics so we’re going to focus on that.
“In that moment I decided that yes, that Olympic dream was over in Paris but that wasn’t the end of my Olympic dreams. That I was going to focus on another four-year cycle.”
So here she is. Better now, mostly better. She had her ankle surgery 10 weeks ago – same surgeon in fact, a decade on from the last one. She and Thomas have moved their life to Belfast and she’s building a team around her with 2028 in mind.
She fully aims to be back running and competing by the time the World Championships come around in Tokyo next September. She’s calling the whole thing Ciara 3.0, gleefully aware of how naff that sounds.
“Sometimes you have to put it into perspective. I’ve done a lot of work since, been told the way it is. The hard facts are, you just need to get over it. You can either carry this thing around on your shoulders and let it burden you and be a weight going forward, or you can say, ‘D’you know what? Life’s not fair sometimes.’
“Sometimes you just need to get over that, and say it isn’t fair, but what you’re going to do is make a plan and move forward. For me, I started making plans. I started looking at houses back home. I arranged my surgery and did what I needed to do to take the next step forward, keep creating new goals to look at.
“I had a lovely message from Katie Mullan [Ireland hockey player] – and I’ll be honest, a lot of messages I didn’t even get around to because I didn’t even have the capacity to reply to them all. Chatting to Katie, I distinctly remember meeting her out in the Institute before I headed off to the Games and just thinking how sad and empty she looked because their Olympic dream was over, they didn’t qualify.
“She said [in the message], ‘I don’t know if I even know how you feel.’ I was like, ‘No, I believe you do, because you know what it feels like to put absolutely everything in.’ To put all of your eggs in the one basket because you have to. And for it not to come true and to actually walk away with nothing, not even the consolation prize, is heartbreaking.
“But that’s sport. I make the decision to put my eggs in that basket because when it pays off, by God it’s beautiful. And when it doesn’t, it’s okay. Because you can say I have no regrets, I gave it absolutely everything, and sometimes, like I’ve been, you’re just really unlucky. I’m really unlucky to have been given two Achilles heels that are my Achilles heels!”
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