She’s still only 22. It’s easy to forget that about Rhasidat Adeleke. Fourth at the Olympics, fourth at the World Championships, silver medal at the Europeans. Relay medals a-go-go, more Irish records than anybody in the sport. And she’s still only 22.
Sometimes, she forgets herself. Like when she was at home last October and decided one day to go to Dundrum Town Centre with her friends. That’s what you do, isn’t it? You haven’t been home in a while and you’ve just had the biggest summer of your life. So you go and hang with your girls, you laugh and shop and gossip and let your other world blur out of focus for a bit.
Except, when you’re Adeleke, your other world doesn’t be long surrounding you. Walking around Dundrum that day, she was hit up for selfies and signatures at every turn. In her innocence, she hadn’t expected it to happen. It wasn’t unpleasant or anything. Just a surprise, somehow.
“I was stopped by like 50 people and had a bunch of people around me asking for pictures and autographs and stuff,” she says. “It’s insane because I just went to Dundrum as I normally would. But I almost forget that I have, I guess, some sort of presence now. It’s really cool. It honestly is really cool.
“In comparison, being out here in Austin, Texas, where I can just walk around freely, nobody really knows who I am. So it kind of makes me forget that I do have that presence back home. But yeah, it’s a blessing.”
Well, yes, up to a point. But you’re allowed to be 22, as well. You’re allowed to have a day with your friends that is yours and theirs and yours and theirs alone. You’re allowed to feel a little uncomfortable if that small and infrequent experience gets eroded by the love bombing of the general public.
“Honestly, I have a different viewpoint on that,” she says. “Okay, it sometimes depends on what mood I’m in. But usually, I don’t have a problem with it because I just want to appreciate it. I don’t want to ever seem like I’m ungrateful, even though having an opposing view wouldn’t necessarily mean that I’m ungrateful.
“But if someone wants a picture with me or an autograph, then they appreciate what I do. And I’m like, the least I can do to give back to them for supporting me is to give them an autograph or to take a picture with them because it doesn’t cost me anything.
“Sometimes it definitely can be overwhelming. I think the most overwhelmed I felt was at the national championships in Santry last year. That was insane. I was like, ‘How do people like Beyoncé handle this? This is crazy!’
“They were telling us that it was the highest turnout they’ve ever had at nationals. And it was so unreal to break the 100m record at it. That was the last national record I was going for and to do it in front of a home crowd that big – it was a top-three moment in my life.”
Adeleke is talking via a video call organised through her partnership with Celsius, the energy drink. Having turned professional in the summer of 2023, she is still picking her way through a world in which she is both a sprinter and a business.
[ Rhasidat Adeleke takes second spot in Diamond League 200m with storming finishOpens in new window ]
Prize money on the track circuit is decent without being amazing – her second place in the Diamond League a fortnight ago in Shanghai was worth $6,000 (€5,355). Not bad for 22.72 seconds’ work, but she won’t run in the Diamond League again until the end of June. So by necessity, the life comes with endorsements as an anchor tenant. How does she choose which ones to lend her name to and which to send back?
“Authenticity is number one,” she says. “I would never work with a brand that I wouldn’t personally use or a drink that I wouldn’t drink. I just think it just does me a disservice and I want to make sure I’m staying true to myself and my beliefs, my morals and values.
“I think as sports people, we’re really now able to understand our brand being beyond sport and being beyond what we do on the track. And almost trying to capitalise off that because we’re not going to be athletes forever. So it’s really important to be able to find a way to steer into your other interests, even while doing your sports, at least to set you up for when you’re done.
“So for me, lifestyle, beauty, fashion – these are things that I’m really fond of. And when it comes to collaborating with different companies, it’s more so looking towards partnerships that I actually have an interest in. I think that’s more authentic than trying to force something that is just being given to me. It’s how you express yourself beyond what people see on the track.
“It’s hard for people to really understand who I am and who we as athletes are because they see us at our most competitive forms. When we’re displaying peak athleticism, we’re not going to be showcasing the large extent of our personalities. So through these opportunities, through branding, through marketing, that’s how we can actually show people who we are.
“As an athlete, we definitely have to watch out for what we put in our body. It’s all important. And compared to a lot of other energy drinks, Celsius stood out in the ingredients and what the benefits are.”
This is her day-to-day, out in the big bad world. She graduated from the University of Texas in May of last year with a degree in Corporate Communications. College was the only American life she’d known and though she kept the same coach and still trains in Austin alongside Julien Alfred and Dina Asher-Smith, adult life is not student life. Even when you’re only 22.
“It was definitely interesting,” she says of the transition. “At first I was like, ‘Okay, this is great! I don’t have school, I can just train and figure out what I’m going to do for the rest of the day.’ Just kind of chill. But I think I’m someone who thrives off structure. So having to create my own structure for the first couple of months was kind of hard.
“I’m still trying to figure out, trying to see what’s going to work for me. At least now we have competitions, which include a lot of travel and then recovery. So that takes a lot of my time now. But trying to figure that out this past autumn when we weren’t competing was harder.”
To occupy herself, she did a fair bit of reading, a lot of TV binge-watching, got into playing Topgolf of all things. She wanted to start a new pastime, maybe sign up for a class here and there. But a lot of what she was into demanded more of her attention than she was willing to slice off from the thing that matters most. She was thinking in terms of the odd drop-in session, not a full-blown new life departure.
“I really was going to pick up a hobby or take some classes,” she says. “Like maybe learn Spanish or tailoring or something I would be into. But the way that those classes were structured, it was almost like an overcommitment. They needed you to be in your seat at 9am every day. I was like, ‘Okay, that’s not gonna work.’
“So after this competition season is over, I need to figure out what’s going to work out for me. I know for sure that basing my whole week on track practice isn’t going to work. I thought at the start that if every day was, ‘prepare for training, go to training, come home and recover’, it would make me so much better. But I think I got into a place where I wasn’t doing anything other than training. So I need to figure out that balance again for the future.”
As we chat, it’s Wednesday morning in Texas and the jetlag from China still has her in its grip. She went to bed on Tuesday at 6pm, woke up at one in the morning and couldn’t get back to sleep. There’s a 13-hour time difference to recalibrate. It will take a while to escape its orbit.
It was a successful trip, all in all. She went to Shanghai first, where she came second in that 200m race at the Diamond League. Then it was onto Hong Kong to link up with the rest of the Ireland relay squad before they all decamped to Guangzhou for the World Relays.
A year ago, they went to the Bahamas for the same event and won bronze in the mixed relay, breaking new ground and revelling wide-eyed in the novelty of it all. There was a different vibe about it this time around. They went to Guangzhou to attend to business.
They got in and got out and got two teams qualified for the World Championships – the women’s 4x400m and the mixed 4x400m. Adeleke didn’t run in the mixed relay final, neither did Sharlene Mawdsley or Sophie Becker. This wasn’t about the podium. At least not the one in Guangzhou.
“The Bahamas was a totally different experience last year,” she says. “For one, it was an Olympic year, so that Olympic qualification was really necessary, right? That was probably the only opportunity that we were going to have to run as a team together at such a high level . . . The level of competition was way higher. All the other countries brought their A-list athletes. It was an Olympic year so everything was really hyped up the whole year.
“But this year it was more about going in, getting a qualification and heading out. We didn’t make it into some monumental equation – it was just World Relays. We did everything very strategically.
“For example, last year I ran the women’s relay and an hour later I ran the mixed relay. And the next day I came back and ran again! Because we had to do it, we had to make sure we got that Olympic qualification. But this year it was more about just getting the job done and then getting ready for the rest of the season.”
Everything about 2025 is different from the way she went about 2024. She skipped the indoor season entirely. Heroics weren’t needed to negotiate the World Relays so she didn’t try to provide them. Between her coach Edrick Floréal and herself, they have been building her body steadily through the winter and spring, adding layer upon layer to sustain her for longer through the season.
“My coach is very focused on us achieving our targets at the World Championships in September. By the time it came to September last year, I was so burnt out physically and mentally. We had just been go, go, go, go, go. The base that I had was wearing away. So what my coach decided to do was more so keep the base going, keep doing that groundwork and then we’ll sharpen up close to the championships.
“I’ve run three times this season so far and each time I was like, ‘Oh my God, I feel very different. I don’t feel as sharp. I don’t feel as quick. I feel sluggish.’ And my coach is trying to remind me: ‘Ray, you’re not trying to break the world record right now. Focus on the goal.’
“So it’s definitely a process. It’s very different to how I used to be at this time of year. But I’m trusting him because what he says is, you know, I missed out on a medal in Paris last year and in Budapest in 2023. So it’s more just doing something different. It could be a risk but you have to take risks sometimes to achieve your goals.”
And so the year lies before her. She will be in Europe for some Diamond League events towards the end of next month and will keep building through the summer towards Tokyo in September. The women’s 400m has turned into one of the deepest events on the track – her Irish record of 49.07 will likely have to fall if she’s going to take a medal.
That’s fine. If that’s what it takes, that’s what it takes. Adeleke will work towards it, gradually, methodically, relentlessly. This is the life she wanted.
She’s 22 and the possibilities are endless.
♦ Rhasidat Adeleke is an ambassador for Celsius Energy Drinks.
