Rhasidat Adeleke breaks Phil Healy’s Irish 200m record

Another superb breakthrough run by Rhasidat Adeleke has seen her overtake Phil Healy as Ireland's fastest woman over 200 metres.

Still only 18, Adeleke continued her already record-breaking freshman season at the University of Texas when clocking 22.96 seconds in her heat of the 200m, while competing at the Big 12 Conference championships, staged at Kansas State University, in Manhattan, Kansas.

That improved Healy’s Irish senior record of 22.99, which had stood to the Cork runner since 2018, set in Santry, and up to last night was the only sub-23 second run by an Irish woman. Adeleke has the chance to go faster again in the final, set for later on Sunday.

Earlier, Adeleke broke the Irish Under-20 and Under-23 100m record when improving her best to 11.31 seconds, and is now second on the senior list to only Healy, who holds that record with her 11.28, also set in 2018 in Cork. She runs that final later also.

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She ran later in the finals, claiming a pair of second-place finishes, first in the 100m in 11.36 and then the 200m in 23.03: both her 200m times will add considerably to her chances of claiming a Tokyo Olympic spot via world rankings. 22.80 is the automatic qualifying time for the 200m.

Last month, Adeleke twice broke the Irish Under-20 200m record, which had lasted 21 years, clocking 23.25 seconds, with that improving the 23.27 she’d run a week earlier.

Before that, the Irish junior record of 23.34 had stood to Emily Maher since the year 2000: by then Maher had already made a name for herself, the Kilkenny athlete winning a sprint double at the inaugural World Youth Games in Moscow in 1998, aged only 17, and later in 2000 was also part of the Irish women's 4x400m relay at the Sydney Olympics.

In the long and illustrious history of Irish athletes taking up a US scholarship, stretching back 73 years to 1948, few athletes have also made such an immediate impression as a freshman, especially in a sprint event.

Before this season, her previous 200m best of 23.52 was set in 2019, the same year she won a rare sprint double at the European Youth Olympics in Baku. Adeleke was poised to go faster last year before Covid-19 brought about a series of cancellations, from her written Leaving Cert exams at Presentation Terenure to the World Under-20 Athletics Championships, set for Nairobi, Kenya, and now rescheduled for this August, one week after the Tokyo Olympics.

For Adeleke, any additional pressure or expectation of delivering at the University of Texas - which last year had the seventh largest single-campus enrolment in the US - has also quickly dissipated. Adeleke doesn’t turn 19 until the end of August. her sprint double in Baku in 2019 being the sixth championship medal in the short career of the then 16-year-old (Adeleke was also part of the 4x100m relay team that won the silver medal at the 2018 World Under-20 championships in Finland.)

During her first indoor season, Adeleke was also in record-breaking form when she improved the under-20 indoor 400 record to 53.44 seconds, at the Big 12 Championships back in February, the then third fastest time for a European, improving the previous Irish record of 54.19, set by Jenna Bromley in 2016.