12 months, 15 winners, but one sportswoman supreme

IRISH TIMES/IRISH SPORTS COUNCIL SPORTSWOMEN OF THE YEAR AWARDS:TWELVE MONTHLY awards, 15 winners, it's no wonder those entrusted with the task of crafting the trophies for The Irish Times/Irish Sports Council Sportswomen of the Year awards asked us to double-check our figures. Twelve in to 15, after all, tends not to go. The overall winner will be chosen today.

There were three months in 2009 when the achievements of Irish sportswomen proved inseparable for the panel of judges, not least in March when Nina Carberry triumphed at Cheltenham once again and Derval O’Rourke, our 2006 Sportswoman of the Year, won bronze at the European Indoor Championships.

In July it was time to double up again when two of the brightest prospects in Irish sport, runner Ciara Mageean and swimmer Gráinne Murphy, confirmed their potential with outstanding performances.

Mageean had already broken Sonia O’Sullivan’s 22-year-old national junior 800 metres record by the time she won silver at the World Youth Championships in Italy, her time there putting the 17-year-old seventh on the Irish all-time list.

Later in the month she went one better in the 1,500 metres at the European Youth Olympics in Finland, winning gold with a time that beat the championship record set by Gabriela Szabo and the Irish junior record that had stood to Natalie Davey since 1991.

Meanwhile Murphy, a year younger than Mageean, excelled at the European Junior Championships in Prague where she was the most successful swimmer at the event, winning three gold medals and one bronze. She became the first Irish swimmer to win European junior gold and broke two championship records.

Later in the month Murphy was record-breaking again, bettering Michelle De Bruin’s gold medal-winning time at the 1996 Atlanta Olympic Games in the 200 metres Individual Medley at the senior World Championships in Rome. In all, the schoolgirl set two European junior, four Irish senior and 10 Irish junior records in July.

Our final joint award came in September when, once again, the achievements of two sportswomen were simply impossible to divide.

Madeline Perry, the only woman to win a monthly award every year since we began in 2004, produced the finest performances of her professional squash career en route to the final of the British Open, her sport’s most prestigious event.

She beat the number three seed Alison Watters in the semi-finals, but it was her quarter-final defeat of world number one Nicol David that will live long in the memory.

The Malaysian, who had beaten Perry in their previous 14 meetings, had topped the world rankings for 41 consecutive months and it was two years since she had failed to reach the final of a tournament. She was two games up against the Irish champion, and had won three match points – but lost the next three games. Perry’s victory was breathtaking.

And breathtaking is all you can say about what Mary O’Connor has accomplished in her sporting career, the Cork woman taking to 12 her tally of All-Ireland medals when she completed another Gaelic football and camogie double with her county in September, captaining the footballers to a five-in-a-row.

Those, then, were our joint monthly winners, the judges proving more single-minded through the rest of the year. Among those chosen were three more newcomers to the awards, Yvonne Tracy, Emma Smyth and Annalise Murphy joining O’Connor, Mageean and Grainne Murphy as debutantes on our roll of honour.

Tracy has been one of the great servants of Irish football, the Limerick woman, who has played for Arsenal since 2000, fighting back from a string of career-threatening injuries to regain her place for both club and country. In October she helped Arsenal to a winning start in the inaugural women’s Champions League and capped a superb display for the Republic of Ireland with the winning goal in their World Cup qualifier away to Kazakhstan.

Smyth, meanwhile, established herself as a senior Irish hockey international in a year when her club, Railway Union, won the first Leinster League title in its 105 year history. Four months in to the 2009-10 season they have won every game they have played, in all competitions, Smyth one of the forces behind their emergence as a powerhouse in Irish hockey.

Annalise Murphy, the sixth of our new faces, took our December award, the 19-year-old Dubliner completing a superb year in Australia where she won the Sail Brisbane and Sydney regattas and finished fourth in Melbourne. Back in August she won the under-21 title at World Championships in Japan where she finished eighth in the senior event.

The Maguire golfing twins, Leona and Lisa, won our April and May awards, Leona for becoming the youngest ever winner of the Scottish Open Amateur Championship at Troon, having already triumphed at the French International Under-21 Amateur Championship, and Lisa for succeeding her sister as Irish Close champion.

We had two more victors from athletics, Mary Cullen winning the February award for breaking Sonia O’Sullivan’s 1997 3,000 metres indoor record, a month before she took bronze at the European Indoor Championships in Turin.

And then, in August, Olive Loughnane won silver in the 20km walk at the World Championships in Berlin, becoming only the fourth Irish athlete – after Eamonn Coghlan (gold in 1983), Sonia O’Sullivan (silver in 1993 and gold in 1995) and Gillian O’Sullivan (silver in 2003) – to win a medal at the event.

Multiple award-winner Jessica Kürten had kick-started our year with a string of top five finishes in two successive World Cup Qualifiers, with Katie Taylor, Sportswoman of the Year in 2008 and 2009, completing our list by successfully defending her European Union Championship title in Bulgaria, her victory in the final her 35th in a row.

That’s the shortlist, then, for the overall award today. A vintage year that must produce a single winner – tempting and all as a joint award might be.

2009 Monthly Winners

January

Jessica Kurten (Equestrian)

February

Mary Cullen (Athletics)

March

Nina Carberry (Horse racing) and Derval O’Rourke (Athletics)

April

Leona Maguire (Golf)

May

Lisa Maguire (Golf)

June