This was the scene: we were in an office in Dublin on a Tuesday lunchtime in December 2018, being introduced to the four young athletes named in the new Accelerator Academy. They were all still in school, two studying for their Leaving Cert, the other two another year away, and coincidentally all girls, sprinters Rhasidat Adeleke and Patience Jumbo-Gula, and distance runners Sarah Healy and Sophie O’Sullivan.
The niftily titled Accelerator Academy was the brainchild of Sonia O’Sullivan and David Matthews, based in part on their own vast experiences when advancing their running careers, particularly on to that daunting senior stage. Between them they ran in six Olympics and saw the opportunity to further guide some of the rising stars of Irish athletics, focusing on academic interests and off-track activities as they finished school, and other things like dealing with the media around future championship events.
So we all got down to some practice. O’Sullivan and Matthews were at the table too, and had clearly chosen their first four academy participants wisely. All four had already won European or World underage championship medals, and despite their tender years were all comfortable and enlightening when talking about their experiences in getting this far, and about how much further they hoped to go.
At the time in sixth year at Holy Child Killiney, Healy had made a name for herself that July when winning two European under-18 gold medals, in the 1,500m and 3,000m. Adeleke, then a fifth-year student not far away at Presentation Terenure, also won gold in the 200m, before O’Sullivan added another silver in the 800m, beaten only by rising British star Keely Hodgkinson, now the Olympic 800m champion.
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Jumbo-Gula was unlucky to miss a medal there, running a European Under-18 Championships record of 11.59 seconds in her 100m semi-final, before finishing fifth in the final. A few weeks later, she won a silver medal with the Irish 4x100m relay at the World under-20 championships (Adeleke missing the final due to injury, but still getting a medal).
Then in her Leaving Cert year at St Vincent’s Dundalk, Jumbo-Gula had also teamed up with the training group of Daniel Kilgallon, alongside Adeleke, and later another young sprinter from Dundalk named Israel Olatunde.
Healy was already eyeing up a law career outside of athletics, having decided against taking the US scholarship route. “Yes, I’m looking at UCD, and happy to stay at home,” she said. “There was interest from America, but I never really considered about going away, I just don’t think it would work for me.”
Adeleke hadn’t yet made up her mind on that front but had some telling words nonetheless.
“Staying injury-free is the most important thing for me,” she told us “And also trust the process, and myself as an athlete, and believe in what I do.” Who wouldn’t believe her now?
Being the daughter of such a famous running mother, O’Sullivan’s future pathway was always going to come under more scrutiny. After finishing school in Melbourne, and despite a heavy pull to places like Villanova, she later headed west to the seaport city of Seattle to attend the University of Washington.
Some 12 months on from the medal success in 2018, Healy won silver at the European Under-20 championships – where another young Irish athlete named Kate O’Connor won a silver medal in the heptathlon, breaking the Irish senior record in the process.
All four academy athletes then had to deal with a considerable roadblock in their development in the form of Covid-19, which effectively ended most competitive outlets in 2020. After that, the careers of all four continued at different paces and down different pathways, on and off the track. In the autumn of 2020, Jumbo-Gula moved to the Netherlands to further pursue her college studies in psychology and sociology and she hasn’t competed on the championship stage since. A perfectly normal and understandable fallout from any sport.
The fact that the careers of three of these four athletes are still soaring, stars still very much rising, is not a bad record at all. It is also evidence that there is no right or wrong pathway to success, only what works best for the athlete at a particular time or place.
It’s impossible to imagine Adeleke’s astonishing trajectory had she not gone to the University of Texas at Austin, where coincidentally O’Connor was also considering attending, before deciding to stay closer to home in Dundalk. O’Sullivan’s career also soon thrived at Washington, and by Irish standards her giant strides on the track in 2023 were arguably second only to Adeleke – winning 1,500m gold at the European Under-23 championships ahead of Healy, who won silver despite being ranked seven seconds faster than anyone in the grade.
Healy spoke openly and honestly about some of those lessons this week, in the aftermath of her gold medal run over 3,000m at the European Indoor Championships last Sunday. She gets another chance to put her renewed confidence to use at the World Indoor Championships in Nanjing next weekend, as will European bronze medal winners O’Connor in the pentathlon, and Mark English in the 800m. O’Sullivan will also race the 1,500m in Nanjing.
For Healy, the decision to move to Manchester in late 2023, joining the same training group as Hodgkinson, has unquestionably helped her career to further excel. The right pathway, at the right time.
