Irish marathon champion Ava Crean has withdrawn from next Monday’s Boston Marathon due to a running-related hip injury. The 20-year-old from Limerick is expected to be back racing within the next two to three weeks.
Crean made running headlines last October when, still only 19, she finished sixth best woman overall in the Dublin Marathon, her time of 2:34:12 some nine minutes faster than she’d run before. As the top Irish women’s finisher, she also earned the national marathon title, the youngest Irish athlete to ever achieve that honour.
Before Dublin, Crean had run two marathons last May, both largely for fun, winning the Great Limerick Run marathon, in 2:43:38 – just eight days after completing her debut marathon in Manchester.
Her 2:34:12 in Dublin resulted in an invitation to the elite women’s race in Monday’s 130th running of the Boston Marathon, the qualification for such an invitation being sub-2:35:00. John Kinsella, her running coach in Limerick, named his club Back 2 Boston, inspired by the tales of his uncles who ran the Boston Marathon in 1983.
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“Ava will out for a few more weeks and hopefully will be back racing soon,” said Kinsella, who has been coaching Crean since last summer. She turned 20 in January, a few weeks after improving her 10km road best to 33:40 in Athenry, an Irish best for an Under-20 athlete.
Meanwhile, Rhasidat Adeleke has confirmed her first 400m race of the season will take place at Diamond League meeting in Shanghai, China on May 16th. The all-star field includes Olympic silver medallist Salwa Eid Naser from Bahrain and Britain’s 2025 World Indoor champion Amber Anning.
Adeleke hasn’t raced individually outdoors since the London Diamond League last July, after which she later withdrew from the World Championships in Tokyo due to “lingering injuries and continuous setbacks”. The 23-year-old did race once indoors, breaking her own Irish 300m mark, before running a 4x400m relay leg in Texas earlier this month.
