Kate O’Connor is sitting in the relative cool of the shade, trackside in Monte Gordo, the beaming smile, though she is still a little red-faced, signalling her first training session of the day is already done.
It’s been 36 degrees all week in this pocket of the Algarve, injecting some mega warmth into her warm-weather training camp, and O’Connor will soon switch into competition mode. She is speaking via Zoom and, for the first time, she’s ready to outline her plans since her breakthrough indoor performances back in March when, just 12 days apart, she won the pentathlon bronze medal in the European Indoor Championships and then silver on the world indoor stage.
Those were the first senior medals won by any Irish athlete in a multi-event. O’Connor had already made a breakthrough in the women’s heptathlon by winning a European under-20 silver back in 2019, before becoming Ireland’s first representative in the Olympic heptathlon, in Paris last summer.
The switch from the pentathlon indoors – five events spread across one day – to the heptathlon outdoors – seven events spread across two days – involves the addition of the 200m and the javelin, the latter being O’Connor’s favourite event. After improving her Irish pentathlon record to 4,781 points, she’s naturally confident of improving her heptathlon record of 6,297 points, set in Lana, Italy, in 2021. She’s targeting the national javelin record too.
READ MORE
“At the start of the year, I gave myself a couple of goals, and I broke them multiple times during indoors,” she says. “My first barrier [in the heptathlon] is to break 6,500. With multi-events, it is just taking it one event at a time, and if I could get myself to the javelin with pretty good scores, then it’s all to play for. We’ve done a lot of work on my 200m this year, I’ve got a lot quicker. So I’m really excited to run a 200 and see what I can do.”
Which Irish players have impressed for the Lions?
That first competition will come at the World University Games, being staged in five cities in the Rhine-Ruhr region in Germany from July 16th-27th. It will be her sole heptathlon before the World Athletics Championships in Tokyo in September, although she’s targeting a few individual events at the national championships at the start of August.
“My obvious goal at the World Universities is to break the national record. If I finish, that should definitely happen. But I’m not putting a limit on the score I could do. Just go out and have a bit of fun, see where I am.
“I think I will put together a pretty big score, but I obviously I have to go out and do it. But I’m really excited for to put a marker in my own head and then figure out what I can do for world championships, which is obviously the main aim for me this year. We’re just trying to keep everything contained.”
Since her indoor success, there have been other changes in the life of the 24-year-old from Dundalk. She has recently signed a sponsorship deal with Adidas, with her father and coach Micheal now also acting as her agent. And she’s poised to go full-time once her master’s in communications and public relations at Ulster University is complete.
“I’m in the middle of my dissertation [examining the visibility of the World Athletics Championships in 2023], it’s not due until September. But training this year has been a little different in that, touch wood, I’ve never had any injuries or niggles. Or anything too bad.
“So we’ve managed to keep building all year, which is nice. After indoors I took a few weeks break, then I was able to keep building from where I left off. We’re trying not to go too mad, not measuring absolutely everything, just focus on the technical stuff that we normally would, and keep building.”
