Rhasidat Adeleke will not be part of the Irish teams at next month’s World Athletics Relays in Botswana as she remains focused on her individual races in the early part of the summer season.
Athletics Ireland have announced their selections for women’s 4x100m and 4x400m and the mixed 4x400m relay for the event, which takes place in the Botswanan capital Gaborone on May 2nd-3rd.
It’s the first time the event has been staged in Africa and will decide 12 of the 16 relay qualifying spots for next year’s World Athletics Championships in Beijing. The top six teams in the mixed 4x400m relay will also qualify for the inaugural World Athletics Ultimate Championship in Budapest this September.
This task of qualifying an Irish quartet in the women’s or mixed 4x400m for next year’s World Championships will be more difficult without Adeleke, who according to a spokesperson for Athletics Ireland “didn’t make herself available for selection”.
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Sharlene Mawdsley and Sophie Becker, who along with Adeleke were part of the women’s 4x400m who finished fourth in the Paris Olympics, are available for the trip to Botswana, and will be joined by two young athletes in Molly Daly and Erin Friel, called up to the Irish senior relay squad for the first time.
European Under-20 400m champion Conor Kelly is also unavailable, as the event clashes with his collegiate competitions in his first year at the University of Texas in Austin.
Adeleke continues to be based in Austin, the 23-year-old racing only once indoors this season, when improving her own Irish indoor 300m record. Her main target this summer are the European Championships in Birmingham in August, although it’s unclear when she will open her outdoor season in the 400m.
With injury forcing Adeleke out of the World Championships in Tokyo last September, and with Thomas Barr retired after 2024, the mixed relay quartet of Mawdsley, Becker, Kelly and Jack Raftery could only finish sixth in their heat. They were almost four seconds off the Irish record set in 2024. Later in the women’s 4x400m heats, the Irish quartet finished last in their heat, almost 10 seconds off the national record set in Paris.
Mawdsley will make her first international appearance since Tokyo, the Tipperary athlete selected for both the women’s and mixed 4x400m and the women’s 4x100m. Rachel McCann is also named in both 4x400m selections, along with 18-year-old Daly, who ran a time of 53.74 seconds in only her third ever race indoors last month. Friel, a former European Youth Olympic medallist, also ran a personal best of 54.20 seconds indoors
For the mixed 4x400m, Raftery, Seán Doggett and Fintan Dewhirst have been selected, with Chris O’Donnell named as a non-travelling reserve. In the women’s 4x100m, Mawdsley is joined by Sarah Lavin, Molly Scott, Ciara Neville, Sarah Leahy, and Precious Akpe-Moses.
Adeleke was part of both the women’s and mixed 4x400m which competed at last year’s World Athletics Relays in Guangzhou, China, helping both teams earn their qualifying spot for last year’s World Championships
Ireland didn’t have any relay teams at last month’s World Indoor Championships in Torun, Poland, which Adeleke, Mawdsley and Becker also skipped.
The selected athletes will head to a training camp in Stellenbosch, South Africa, ahead of the event in Botswana.
