Malachy Clerkin: Ciara Mageean carried herself with grace, wit and a fundamental beauty of the soul

“Have you ever seen that movie White Chicks?” Ciara Mageean asked, laughing as she told a story against herself. She was describing an afternoon in St Vincent’s hospital when she had an appointment for a scope on her bowel. Before they go in with the camera, they need to, eh, clear the area – and now the laxative given to her by the nurse was kicking in with a vengeance. Only problem was, she had an elderly man in front of her, already using the nearest toilet.

“You know the scene?” she said, “One of the lads needs the toilet and he’s like, ‘Move, bitch!’ and barges past a girl in the loos – I was nearly like that with this wee old man. I was like, ‘Is he going to come out of that toilet? Is he coming out? Because if he doesn’t, there’s going to be a disaster all over this ward.’ As soon as he opened the door, I nearly knocked him over on the way in ...”

As she relayed this little vignette, her voice was rising and her hands were moving and her Portaferry accent was growing more and more high-pitched. She was recreating her shoulder barge on the unsuspecting senior citizen in his hospital gown, who’d just had the European 1,500m champion blow past him as he shuffled out of the loo. She was in full stand-up comedian mode.

So much so that it was easy to forget that she was actually telling the story of one of the worst days of her life. An hour or so after she bowled past the wee old man in the toilet, the nurse asked if she had someone who could be in the room with her when she spoke to the doctor. That was May 20th, 2025, the day she found out she had cancer.

Less than 18 months later, she’s gone. The news fell like a cartoon anvil, smashing a blue-skied Sunday morning to smithereens. Even though the prognosis was never very good and her death was always going to come too soon, this still feels like an intolerable, preposterous reality to get your head around. It’s only a week since she was dancing in her wedding dress in Darver Castle in Co Louth.

Her loss leaves the biggest hole in the lives of her family and those closest to her, of course. Long after the tributes from all around Ireland and beyond have melted away, her new husband Thomas, her parents and siblings, her manager and her dearest friends will be bereft. The death of a public figure is still an intensely private thing for a small group of people, one that isn’t always helped by a chorus of well-meaning hosannas from beyond the four walls.

But they will know better than anyone the extent to which their Ciara connected with the wider world. The depth of the affection she inspired among people she’d never even met, the sense so many had of her as the best kind of sportsperson to root for.

Think of all the times you were standing in your livingroom, up off the couch, balling your fists as she came around the top bend and roaring at her to go, go, go, GO ON! Or of the interviews she’d give afterwards, spent and emotional, every scintilla of herself left on the track, whatever the result. Or of the many times she took stands, flinty and defiant, railing against doping, against homophobia, against genocide in Gaza.

She was funny, brave, smart and charismatic. She kept coming back from injury, she kept getting up after failures. She was poetry in motion on the good days and she never let herself be caged in by the cruelty of the bad ones. Who else would you want wearing your country’s colours on the world stage? What else would you want from an athlete who kids look up to?

Most of all, she was one of Ireland’s greatest ever runners. It’s easy to forget that sometimes, to get carried away by the force of her personality and the depth of the love people had for her. Run your finger through the book of Irish middle-distance records – she holds the fastest ever women’s outdoor time in the 800m, the 1km, the 1,500m and the mile.

She lost so many years to injury and yet she still ended her career with gold, silver and bronze European medals, as well as a Commonwealth silver and a European indoor bronze. She was a seven-time Irish champion. She is one of a tiny handful of Irish athletes to have won a Diamond League event.

In maybe her greatest ever performance, she finished fourth in the World Championships in 2023. The silver medallist from that race is Ethiopia’s Diribe Welteji, who is currently serving a two-year doping ban. Mageean was a mile clear of the field in fourth, robbed of her best ever chance of a world podium spot by an unrepentant cheat. And still she kept coming.

A year later, her crowning glory came with that European gold medal in Rome. It was a race that summed her up in so many ways. All the talent that had marked her out for greatness from such an early age, it was all in there as she waited out the three-and-a-half laps before making her move. And in the devastating 100m that saw her home.

The sudden burst down the home straight, elbowing her way between the two British runners with a drive of pure endurance and will. The “I didn’t grow up playing camogie to get boxed in” line she delivered with so much pleasure afterwards. The arms flung in the air as she crossed the line, all the bad times cast out into the Italian night.

We didn’t know then that we were seeing her at the top of the mountain. Georgia Bell, the English runner she beat into silver that evening, took bronze at the Olympics in Paris just eight weeks later. Mageean didn’t even make the start line, nobbled by an old Achilles injury the week before the games. She was back in Belfast by then, throwing herself into a hen do for an old schoolfriend. Sitting heartbroken in a restaurant called Le Parisien, of all places, trying not to think about it.

In the months that followed, every Irish sports journalist tried to get her to sit down for an interview but she wasn’t ready until late November. She met us all in a conference room in a Dublin hotel and started by apologising for going dark for so long. And then she sat down and opened a vein and spoke for 40 minutes about the devastation of Paris and everything that came after it. She was wry, sad, hopeful and hilarious all at the same time.

“I went back into the Olympic Village to collect my stuff and ran into Rhys [McClenaghan]. He’s from 30 minutes up the road from me and I was so proud of him that he got his gold medal. And he was like, ‘I’m so sorry, I don’t know what to say.’ And I said, ‘Don’t say anything. It’s fine. Enjoy and bask in your glory.’ Because I will process what I need to process. You don’t need to worry about me.

“And then I met Kellie [Harrington]. She was coming through the village and she was on her way to Primark/Penneys. And she was brilliant. She was like, ‘Here, come on, I’m going to Penneys, do you want to come?’ And I was going, ‘No, no. Thanks Kellie, but I’m packing a bag to go home.’

“But that’s the sheer joy of the Irish team. We’ve got such beautiful people. And I think for me, I’ve learned so much from sport for life. If you can learn to take joy in other people’s successes, it just brings you so much joy for yourself.”

That was Ciara Mageean. She wasn’t naive and she wasn’t starry-eyed but she believed in the power of decency and good energy and finding the laugh in a bad situation. She knew better than most that neither sport nor life provides anything by way of guarantees. Her best armour against it all was to carry herself with grace, wit and a fundamental beauty of the soul.

She got a rotten form of cancer. It started in her bowel and spread to her liver and her lungs. Initial hopes that her youth and fitness and general good living would help her were dashed on Christmas Eve last year when she found out that she wouldn’t be a candidate for surgery. Outside the consultant’s office, she swore Thomas and her sister Máire to secrecy – bad enough that their Christmas was ruined, she wouldn’t be bringing the rest of her family down with them.

Even then, she thought she might get two or three years out of it. In the end, she got another 10 months and a week. Enough to get her brilliant book finished alongside the writer Cliona Foley. Enough to get a hen do of her own and a wedding in Belfast three weeks ago and a hooley in Darver last weekend.

“We lucked out,” wrote her great friend, the Paralympian swimmer Ellen Keane on Instagram on Sunday morning. Anyone who was fortunate enough to spend time in Ciara Mageean’s company knows what she means. The beauty of her life is that countless people who never met her know it too.

Sleep well, Ciara. Run free.