The easiest way to judge the quality of a year enjoyed by Ireland’s sportswomen is to browse through the list of high achievers who didn’t even win a monthly award. And there were more than plenty of them who deserved a place on that list in 2019, the difficulty being that we had far too many high achievers. It’s a good complaint, though.
Among them were serial monthly winners from over the years, including Katie Taylor, Sanita Puspure, Leona Maguire, Ciara Mageean and Jenny Egan, and a batch of newcomers to these awards, namely Kate O’Connor, Rhasidat Adeleke, Denise O’Sullivan, Roisin Upton, Niamh Kilkenny and Lyndsey Davey.
Add in Phil Healy, Mona McSharry and Rachael Blackmore and we had a stellar cast of names who, between them, made it another exceptional year for our sportswomen.
Picking an overall winner, though, was a merciless task. That selection will be announced on Friday afternoon at the awards ceremony in the Shelbourne Hotel.
Monthly Winners
December (2018): Mona McSharry (Swimming)
Not content with being part of the winning team on RTÉ’s Ireland’s Fitness Family, the 19-year-old from Sligo, a member of the Marlins club in Ballyshannon, Co Donegal, also managed to make 2019 another memorable year in the pool by adding yet more medals and records to her already bulging collection.
She ended 2018 by collecting six titles in the space of just three days, as well as breaking six national records, at the Irish Short-Course Championships. And a year on, the former World and Junior European Champion won her first ever medal in a world senior event when she took bronze in the 50m breaststroke at the European Short Course Championships in Glasgow, as well as breaking more records along the way.
January: Phil Healy (Athletics)
The Cork woman’s target for the year was to build on a hugely successful 2018, and it began brightly when she once again won the 400m at the Vienna International Indoor Meet in January. But in April she was struck by the mother of all setbacks when she fractured a metatarsal in her foot.
Her coach Shane McCormack described Healy as a “warrior” for the effort she put in to get back in to action so quickly, not least because she had said her biggest challenge “was actually learning how to run again”. But she got herself back for her first ever outdoor World Championships and will target Olympic qualification when the new season gets underway.
February: Ciara Mageean (Athletics)
Records galore, a 1500m bronze medal at the European Indoor Championships, becoming the first Irish female athlete to reach a World Championship 1500m final since Sonia O’Sullivan in 1997, a silver with the Irish team at the European Cross Country Championships and voted Irish Athlete of the Year – let’s just say, Ciara Mageean can reflect on 2019 rather fondly.
She began the year by setting new Irish indoor mile and 1,500m records, so the signs were there that there were good things to come. And along the way the Portaferry woman also happened to provide some of the most entertaining post-race interviews, even teaching residents of non-northern counties a brand new word: boke. As in vomit.
March: Rachael Blackmore (Horse Racing)
The Tipperary woman won’t forget 2019 in a hurry. Before this year just three jockeys – Ruby Walsh, Davy Russell and Bryan Cooper – had 90 or more winners in a season this decade, and that’s the total Blackmore finished with when she was runnerup to Paul Townend in the race for the Irish jockeys’ championship.
There were plenty of memorable days along the way, but perhaps none more so than her first Cheltenham winners, the first a 16-length win on A Plus Tard, the second on board 50/1 outsider Minella Indo for her first Festival Grade One triumph.
April: Leona Maguire (Golf)
After a glittering college career, when she just about won it all, Maguire entered the professional ranks last year, her aim to secure her LPGA Tour card. And she achieved just that in 2019 when she finished seventh in the Symetra Tour rankings, a top-10 placing the requirement to step up to the big time.
Back in April she won her first professional tournament, the Windsor Golf Classic in California, and just five weeks later she won her second in North Carolina when a final round of 66 gave her a five-shot victory over the chasing pack. She will, then, join Antrim’s Stephanie Meadow on the LPGA Tour next season.
May: Jenny Egan (Canoeing)
It was another top class year for one of Ireland’s most consistent performers on the international stage. Egan, a member of the Salmon Leap club in Leixlip, ending the season ranked at number one in the canoe sprint world rankings.
The highlights of her 2019 came over successive weekends in late May/early June when she won two World Cup medals, the first a silver in the 5,000m at the canoe sprint World Cup in Poznan, missing out on gold by less than a second, following it up with a bronze over the same distance at the event in Duisburg.
June: Katie Taylor (Boxing)
Come the end of 2019 the Boxing Writers Association of America selected Taylor as their female fighter of the year, a decision that most probably took half a second to reach. Our four time Sportswoman of the Year had, after all, stretched her professional record to 15-0 in the course of 2019, adding yet more belts to her collection.
In Philadelphia in March she beat Rose Volante to take the WBO lightweight title before unifying the division at Madison Square Garden in June when won on a majority decision against Delfine Persoon. And come November in Manchester she became a two-weight world champion when she took the WBO super lightweight title by beating Christina Linardatou.
July: Rhasidat Adeleke (Athletics) and Kate O’Connor (Athletics)
If 2018 had been a thrilling year for Irish athletics with so many of our young competitors excelling, among them Sarah Healy, Rhasidat Adeleke, Sophie O’Sullivan, Molly Scott, Gina Akpe-Moses, Ciara Neville and Patience Jumbo-Gula, all of them collecting medals at various distances, 2019 wasn’t half bad either.
In winning silver in the heptathlon at the European Under-20 Championships in Sweden, Kate O’Connor became the first Irish woman to medal at any level in the event, and the first to pass the 6,000 points mark. Meanwhile, Adeleke added to her honours at the European Youth Olympic Festival, the Tallaght AC sprinter winning gold in the 100m and 200m.
August: Sanita Puspure (Rowing)
It was an emotionally draining year for Puspure who lost her sister Inese after her lengthy battle with cancer, but remarkably she was still able to rise to the occasion in both the European Championships in Lucerne and World Championships in Ottensheim, Austria.
She set a new European record to take gold in the single sculls at the Europeans, and then she sealed Olympic qualification with a powerful performance in the semi-finals of the World Championships. And in the final she came from behind to overtake former world champion Emma Twigg for a clear-water victory to retain the gold medal she had won in Bulgaria the year before.
September: Niamh Kilkenny (Camogie) and Lyndsey Davey (Gaelic football)
Kilkenny – as in Niamh, not the county – produced one of the great Croke Park performances when she drove Galway to their first senior title since 2013, their winning score of 3-14 against Kilkenny – the county, not Niamh – the highest in a final for 18 years. That peerless display, added to her form throughout 2019, earned her the Player of the Year award and her sixth All-Star.
Davey, meanwhile, had yet another exceptional season for Dublin, which was rewarded with a fifth All Star, earning the player of the match award for her performance against Galway which saw the Dubs complete a three-in-a-row and Davey win her fourth All Ireland medal.
October: Denise O’Sullivan (Soccer)
While her teammates at club and international level have long appreciated the Cork woman’s gifts, 2019 was, perhaps, the first time a wider audience – thanks largely to RTÉ’s coverage of the Republic of Ireland’s European Championship qualifying campaign – got to see just what a quality player the midfielder is.
She was the only Irish player included in the Guardian’s recent list of the best female footballers in the world after a year that saw her leading North Carolina Courage to their second successive league title, being voted the club’s ‘MVP’ (most valuable player) for the second year running by her team-mates and picking up the Irish Player of the Year award too.
November: Róisín Upton (Hockey)
Ireland had missed out on qualification for Rio when they lost to China in a shootout, and they looked set to experience the very same agony in November when they went 3-1 down to Canada in another shootout. They fought their way back in to it, though, thanks to brilliant conversions from Bethany Barr and Chloe Watkins and the goalkeeping of Ayeisha McFerran.
It was Upton who scored the goal that ultimately clinched qualification for the Irish women for the very first time, the Limerick woman gutsy enough to step up again in sudden death having failed to score in the regular shootout. And she did it too with a broken bone in her wrist.
