The Irish Times/Sport Ireland Sportswoman Award for March: Kate O’Connor (Athletics)
As Ian O’Riordan, our man at the World Indoor Championships, put it, it was a measure of what Kate O’Connor achieved through 2025, and the standards she has set for herself, that in Poland last month, she ended up harbouring “some feelings of regret” after “only” managing to win bronze in the pentathlon.
“Is it awful that I’m a little bit disappointed in myself?” she asked after smashing her own Irish record en route to winning her fifth successive championship medal in just under 13 months. It was just the second World Indoor Championship medal Ireland had won in the last 20 years – the other one by, yes, Kate O’Connor – so her disappointment was, indeed, awful.
But awfully impressive too from our 2025 Sportswoman of the Year, with gold the only colour on her mind this weather.
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Irish athletics aficionados had long known about O’Connor’s potential, but she introduced herself with a bang to most of the rest of us last year, the highlight being that heptathlon silver medal at the World Championships in Tokyo.
By then, she had become the first Irish athlete to medal in a senior multi-event when she won pentathlon bronze in the European Indoor Championships, and less than a fortnight later she became just the third Irishwoman, after Sonia O’Sullivan and Derval O’Rourke, to make a World Indoor podium when she took silver in China. Throw in that World University Games gold and, well, it was some year.
By the time she got to Poland last month, she was carrying a couple of niggling injury problems, most notably an issue with her knee, as well as a heap of expectations, but that tenacious competitive spirit with which we’ve become familiar carried her through to another podium spot. Sophie Dokter took gold for the Netherlands, the United States’ Anna Hall moving above O’Connor after the final event to take silver.
“I came in here and wanted to win the gold,” said O’Connor. “I suppose that’s the competitiveness in me coming out. And I have to check myself a little bit and say, ‘come on, Kate, you just did a national record there, and came away with another global medal’.
“And I am proud. But, yeah, I’m competitive and I want more, and I think it’s a great thing that I want more. Hopefully, I’ll just continue building,” she added. “I think that the sky’s the limit for me. I’ll keep working really hard behind the scenes and hopefully change the colour, and move upwards again next time.”
O’Connor is taking a well-earned break after Poland, but she’ll be back in action in July at the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow, where she will represent Northern Ireland, and just over a week later, she’ll look to add to that medal tally at the European Championships in Birmingham. And, need it be said, she has gold on her mind.
