Ciara Mageean remained relatable, unaffected and authentic across her extraordinary career

In the summer of 2023, Ciara Mageean wrote a tender and typically candid piece for the athletics magazine Spikes. In it she reflected on the tortuous cycle of setbacks and comebacks that had shaped her career, and the times when she was carried by mulish perseverance.

At the beginning of the piece she wrote about an operation on a bone spur that had haunted her early career and threatened to derail it. She would train for a day and stop and suffer for the next two. She took injections and advice. Second opinions. She rested, she stretched, she iced, she ran, she stopped. If she was out with friends and they had to make a burst for the bus, she couldn’t sprint on command. It cut the ground from under her feet.

Mageean was only 20 at the time. In order to remove the bone spur they needed to cut some tendons and that was the worrying part. The chances that the operation would be a success were more than 80 per cent. It was the other possibility that preyed on her mind.

“What am I going to be if I’m not The Runner?” Mageean wrote. “For so many years, that’s how everyone knew me, and while they only ever meant well, trying to be supportive, when you hear that enough times you intrinsically start to refer to yourself that way. The Runner becomes your identity.”

Over the years, though, the public’s connection with Mageean and her story went far beyond a label. People who couldn’t quote track times and results had feelings for her that very few sportspeople excite. Even people with just a passing interest in athletics had a sense of how much she had struggled and how much she had overcome.

[ Irish Olympian and European champion Ciara Mageean dies aged 34Opens in new window ]

She never tried to mask her vulnerability, but she wasn’t defined by that either. Her story was about strength.

Mageean was open and vivacious and big-hearted and even from a distance all of that was magnetic. Even though she was one of the greatest athletes that Ireland had ever produced, she was relatable and unaffected and authentic.

The smile that she wore in public never felt painted. And in those snap interviews that athletes are obliged to do at major championships while the heat of the race is still red on their faces, she never tried to put on a pose or pretend; when her heart was breaking it was plain to see. She would never try to deny her feelings. It was impossible not to root for her.

Being The Runner stretched Mageean and revealed her. “I believe all those tough years, dealing with injury, setback, not getting an Irish vest for a whole load of years – all that resilience I had to build up makes me the athlete I am today,” she said at the end of 2023. “Sometimes I look back on what I put up with and think, ‘fair play’.”

The season before, 2022, had been the best of her career: she won silver at the European Championships and the Commonwealth Games, won a Diamond League race for the first time and came second in the Diamond League final. Along the way she broke Sonia O’Sullivan’s Irish record for the 1,500m, which had stood since 1995.

[ Ciara Mageean: ‘I probably won’t make my 40th birthday. That’s rough’Opens in new window ]

The significance of that was not lost on anybody. When Mageean made a spectacular breakthrough as a teenager, comparisons with O’Sullivan were instantly coined. At that stage of her career, she kept breaking records that O’Sullivan had once held or was doing things earlier than O’Sullivan had once done.

“I never took it as a burden,” she said many years ago. “I just said, ‘if they want to compare me, they can compare me’. I always thought that hopefully one day I can make them see that I’m Ciara Mageean and they’ll not want to compare me to anybody else.”

Being precocious must have brought its own pressure. Mageean was just 15 when she won her first National Indoors title in Belfast, a junior running against seniors. “This young one, I didn’t know who she was, just refused to let Roseann Galligan go by,” said Jerry Kiernan years later, after he had become her coach and friend. “I knew nothing about her. She made a huge impression on me, but this country has produced so many good underage athletes who never made the transition to being a top senior.”

Kiernan and Mageean didn’t meet then, but they did by chance two years later, outside a studio in RTÉ. Kiernan was covering a major championships in his usual role as an analyst and Mageean had come in to be interviewed about her silver medal from the world juniors. Of the 24 medals for distance events at those championships, 23 had been won by African runners. Mageean was the only exception.

[ Ciara Mageean in her own words: ‘I was told she didn’t want to coach me any more’Opens in new window ]

“For her to be in the mix astounded everybody,” said Kiernan. “There was something different about her. You don’t go to the world juniors, mix it with the Africans, and win a medal without being different.”

Mageean didn’t come from an athletics background. She grew up in Portaferry on the tip of the Ards Peninsula where hurling thrives in a fervent colony. Her father, Chris “Hunter” Mageean, played on the Down team that caused tremors in the early 1990s and that was the tradition in which she was raised. She played camogie for Down and Ulster and won a colleges’ All Star, and if there hadn’t been another arena for her brilliance camogie would have been it.

“If you asked any of the girls I played camogie with or played camogie against they would tell you that I had a competitive mentality from an early age,” she said. “Especially my friends that didn’t play sport. They were like, ‘Ciara, you’re a bit scary whenever you play camogie’.”

That grounding never left her. When she won gold at the 2024 European Championships in Rome, Mageean was trapped in a pocket on the final bend, sweating on an opening. When a shaft of daylight appeared between two British runners, she surged into a gap barely big enough for one. “She has burst her way through,” roared Greg Allen in the RTÉ commentary.

“I didn’t grow up playing camogie to get boxed in,” Mageean said afterwards.

A teacher spotted Mageean’s talent for athletics but there was no support for that discipline in the school and there was no club at home. So, one night a week she went from school straight to Belfast to train under Eamonn Christie and on the other nights she trained by herself in the local hurling field, singular and driven.

Over the years there were times when she depended on that determined streak just to keep going. In her running career, some of the disappointments Mageean suffered were cruel and concussive. Her experience of the Olympics was joyless. In Rio she finished 11th in her semi-final; in Tokyo she tore her calf in one of her last training spins and took her place on the start line without any hope of doing herself justice; in Paris she injured her Achilles tendon a couple of weeks before the Games and was forced to withdraw.

[ In Pictures: the life and career of Ciara MageeanOpens in new window ]

And there were other experiences like that. At the 2017 World Championships she trailed in last in her heat, with nothing in the tank. In the piece she wrote for Spikes, Mageean spoke about that season with disarming frankness and typical openness.

“In 2017, I developed a problem with under-fuelling,” she wrote. “I’m lucky it was never an eating disorder – it wasn’t a deliberate thing – but it affected me on the track. I was having all these unexplained underperformances and I didn’t know why. But I just wasn’t hungry. I’d get in from training and I didn’t want to eat my dinner, and my boyfriend would be splitting it up like I was a kid, telling me: At least eat that much.

“To any athlete who experiences this: reach out for help. I didn’t do that soon enough and it cost me that season.”

Mageean came back from that too. In the last five seasons of her career she won four medals at European Championships: gold, silver and bronze outdoors and an indoor bronze. In the midst of all that she came fourth at the World Championships too. Mageean was stronger and faster in her early 30s than she had been at any other time in her career. She never gave up on being the runner she believed she could be.

The medals, though, were not the measure of her. Mageean was never just The Runner. She was one of those rare sportspeople whose spirit radiated far beyond the arena. That spirit is everlasting.