Here follows a list. It’s not a comprehensive list and you can bet good money that it’s missing a few names. But it’s a list nonetheless, in no particular order. Save your questions to the end.
Let’s start with Sophie Becker, Phil Healy and Sharlene Mawdsley. We’ll throw in Aisling Thompson and Amy O’Connor too. Orla Comerford is well worth putting in there, Leona Maguire is a must. Vikki Wall, Jennifer Dunne and Orla O’Dwyer can’t be overlooked, nor would we have much credibility if we sped past Aoife O’Rourke and Shannon Sweeney.
Onwards, through Margaret Creman and Aoife Casey and Ellen Walshe. Not forgetting Erin King and Danielle Hill. We must make sure to mention the Athlone Town footballers who won the league and the Ireland T20 cricket team that went through the calendar year unbeaten. And Lucy Latta and Siobhán McCrohan and Thammy Nguyen. And on and on.
So. You’re wondering what the list is about. It’s obviously something to do with women’s sport in 2024. Each of those names is linked by a career achievement at some stage over the past 12 months – but that’s not quite it.
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All of them have won either a World, European or Paralympic medal. Or they’ve lifted an All-Ireland or a captured league title or broken an Irish record or made an Olympic final. They’ve had a year of years, all of them. But that’s not quite it either.
It’s this. Despite all that success, none of them was The Irish Times Sportswoman of the Month at any point. The reason for listing them out like this is not to blow raspberries at them for missing out. Rather, it’s to give a sense of how high the bar has risen for Irish sportswomen in 2024.
These awards started in 2004, which makes this 20th anniversary as good a time as any to sit and reflect on how far everything has come. The first monthly prize, in February 2004, went to Azmera Gebrezgi, an 18-year-old runner who led the Irish junior women to team victory in the Celtic Cup cross-country in Scotland.
Sonia O’Sullivan won the May award for two ho-hum early-season races either side of the Atlantic. “In a way, I designed that month as a break from training,” was her happy, if baffled, response to The Irish Times giving her a gong for her efforts. Looking back, there’s a fair chance we were hoping some of Sonia’s prestige would rub off on the award, rather than the other way around.
Look how far everything has come. The distance from there to here is interplanetary. This year’s list has Olympic champions, Paralympic champions, world champions and European champions. It has the greatest female jockey ever to jump a fence, the greatest female boxer ever to lace a glove. The women who flew Ireland’s sporting flag in 2024 aren’t just internationally respected, they’re the women other countries study to see what can be achieved.
This was a year in which so many of them had to burst their ceiling just to be competitive. Nobody has won more monthly awards than Katie Taylor (18!), yet she is still battling through wars that nobody else would involve themselves in. Her victory over Amanda Serrano in November was notable primarily for its ferocity but also for the millions of people who came away from the Tyson-Paul charade going: “At least the women put on a proper fight.”
Excellence is just expected now. Leona Maguire won her first ever tournament on the European Tour – the first ever by any Irish woman – and the general consensus is that she had a down year. Rhasidat Adeleke won a Diamond League 400m race a fortnight before the Olympics and 99.9 per cent of the population shrugged.
Rachael Blackmore became only the fifth jockey in half a century to add the Champion Chase to the Grand National, Gold Cup and Champion Hurdle. Most people turned the page to see what she was riding in the Grand Annual.
These aren’t insults, either. Maguire, Adeleke and Blackmore are world class in their field and, ultimately, all three will remember 2024 as a year in which they fulfilled less of their potential than they wished. You had to see Adeleke on the Friday night she came fourth in the Olympic 400m to understand the breadth of her expectations for herself. The best ever result by an Irish sprinter was of no consolation to her. The podium only has three steps.
We saw plenty of Irish women climb those steps through the year. Though Ciara Mageean’s season ended with the cruel timing of an Achilles flare-up in her last training session before Paris, her European gold in Rome six weeks earlier was eternal. Adeleke brought three medals home from the Euros, two in the relays and one silver on her own.
The relays themselves were glorious drama all through the summer. From the mixed 4x400m team taking bronze in the Bahamas and gold in Rome to the women’s team that came second in the Euros, and that agonising, heart-stopping fourth in the Olympics. Adeleke was always destined to be a household name but Becker, Healy and Mawdsley grabbed the country in a way nobody expected. Next year’s 4x400m world final is at lunchtime on Sunday, September 21st. Ring it in the calendar.
Ultimately, the moment of the year fell to Kellie Harrington. No Irish boxer had ever won back-to-back Olympic golds. No Irish woman had ever done two in a row in any sport. She went to Paris carrying a weight of public pressure unlike anyone else. She was convinced she had lost a chunk of the Irish people in 2023 and had no guarantee of winning them back.
But as she stood there in Roland Garros on that Tuesday night in August, singing Grace to the Irish fans who had hung on long past the last trains to be with her, Harrington could be in no doubt as to the level of affection in which she is held. She let the great world spin and got into the ring and did what she was best at.
They all did.
The next 20 years can’t come quick enough.
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