About to become a two-time Olympian, Phil Healy spoke to KIERAN McCARTHY about emerging from the hardest period of her career
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JOAN Healy didn’t expect any other reaction. In early May, after Phil returned home from the World Athletics Relays in the Bahamas, Joan told her younger sister that she was retiring from athletics immediately after another injury setback.
Phil’s response was instant: get over your strop. She didn’t believe Joan. Phil has a just-get-on-with-it attitude that can be traced back to home in Knockaneady, Ballineen, the environment that shaped the two fastest women to emerge from West Cork and who just so happen to be sisters.
Their intertwining journey in athletics has sunk a deep bond between the two, but there’s also a natural competitiveness and spikiness there. They were two sisters, separated by 25 months, in direct competition in a race that started as kids on their lawn at home: who is the fastest?
Joan’s spoken before how Phil never let her feel sorry for herself. A filter doesn’t exist, and Joan prefers that. Stop making excuses. Stop complaining. Just get on with it. It’s an insight into the steel core and hardiness behind Phil’s rise to become the fastest woman in Ireland – she held the Irish women’s 100m record from June 2018 to September 2023.
Away from the track there’s a softer side.
‘Watching Joan struggle all the time and not catching a break, I am lucky to have that career I have had,’ she admits.
‘It does make you realise sport can be over very quickly, whether it’s an injury too many or whether you’re a younger athlete not achieving your potential.
‘I’m in a very privileged position to be able to go to an Olympics and you don’t appreciate that until you go through the tougher times.’
Maybe Joan’s hard-luck story resonates with Phil more these days because she’s endured her own troubles.
FAMILY MATTERS: Phil Healy (centre) with her sister Joan and mum Phil at the 2022 Cork City Sports meet.(Photo: Martin Walsh)
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This is a short Olympic cycle, three years compared to the usual four which made it more attractive to Phil, but the Tokyo and Paris Games bookend the toughest period of her story: an 18-month stretch that started with getting Covid after the 2022 World Indoors, followed by an irregular thyroid issue that led to her form falling off a cliff and culminated in her fourth-place finish in the women’s 100m final at the national championships that forced Phil to cut her 2023 season short. She felt like she was running in mud. Getting nowhere.
Her smile has returned now. The Phil of old is back in the building. But this was a tough slog. She fell out of love with athletics. It wasn’t fun. Within this bang-your-head-against-the-wall year and a half of frustration, Phil spent a few months living with Joan and her now husband Fintan at their home in Tower, just north of Cork city. Both were struggling at the time, Joan had a foot injury that left her in a protective boot until the day before her wedding on October 7th last and Phil was contemplating packing it all in. For her to even reach that point, given her just-get-on-with-it attitude, shows how close to the precipice she felt she was. Irritated. Anxious. Just not happy.
‘I wasn’t taking the easy way out by saying “I’m going to retire, I’m going to stop”, I have achieved so much in my sporting career, have performed at international level for ten years and that takes its toll mentally and physically,’ she explains.
‘I had been very lucky that I never got injured so it hit harder when you do get those tough times. It went on for so long and there was no light at the end of the tunnel, that's why I considered retiring.’
Her slump at the 2023 national outdoor championships in Santry didn’t help her mood, trailing home in fourth place in the 400m final, three seconds off her best. It stung. Not next or near good enough. For an athlete who can reel off her times and splits in an instant, the disdain for her time that day speaks volumes: ‘Fifty-four something’. That was the darkest moment before the dawn of her comeback.
‘That was so chronic and I’m glad that it was because it made me stop and get off the train,’ Phil admits.
‘As athletes we constantly live in hope that things are going to improve, but I needed that performance to be so bad that it made me stop my season and take a rest, and to mentally and physically recharge.
‘It has been a drastic change in the time since, and obviously I’m thrilled with that. To be going now to an Olympic Games, to enjoy it a lot more and to have the love for the sport back … because I definitely lost the love for the sport.’
It’s with that backdrop of the tougher times that Phil is now in a place in her life that will encourage her to enjoy these Games in Paris.
‘If you asked me 12 months ago if I would be going to an Olympic Games, I wouldn’t have seen it as a possibility,’ she admits, but the Ballineen Bullet is firing again.
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SILVER SENSATIONS: The Irish women's 4x400m relay team that won silver at the European Championships in Rome; from left, Rhasidat Adeleke, Phil Healy, Sophie Becker and Sharlene Mawdsley.
Form is temporary, class is permanent. Phil’s comeback picked up speed early this year. She won the Irish indoor 200m title in February. That was encouraging. Finally, she was turning a corner. Phil ran the first leg on the Irish women’s 4x400m team that finished fifth at the World Indoors in early March, running a national record of 3:28.45 in the semi-final.
At the World Athletics Relays in May, Phil – along with Sophie Becker, Rhasidat Adeleke and Sharlene Mawdsley – qualified the Irish women’s 4x400m team for the Olympics and set a new national record at the same time, 3:24.38. Now Phil was motoring. Roll on the European Athletics Championships in June when Phil was part of the same quartet that won a sensational silver medal – the Bandon AC star’s first international medal – and smashed the Irish record, again, with a stunning 3:22.71. In the semi-final, Phil ran her fastest-ever split of 51.29. Back in business. At the outdoor national championships Phil raced to 200m gold to complete the indoor and outdoor double. She has won a staggering SEVENTEEN national senior titles (nine outdoors, eight indoors) since 2014, from 60m up to 400m, highlighting her versatility. She’s found her mojo at the right time, as Paris moves into sight.
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‘For me, I will turn 30 in November 2024 so will this be my last Olympic cycle? That’s possible. There is more at stake than Tokyo. Everyone wants to become an Olympian, I want to become a two-time Olympian; that’s what I am aiming for’ – Phil told us in December 2023, at a period when she was feeling more optimistic about the future, though still navigating choppy waters.
When she takes to the purple – yes, purple – track at the Stade de France, either with the Irish mixed 4x400 relay team on August 2nd or the women’s 4x400 relay quartet on August 9th, she will realise that long-held ambition. Take a bow, you two-time Olympian.
GOOD TIMES: Phil Healy with her silver medal at the European Championships.
‘I see myself as no different to anyone else, but others see it differently,’ she replies modestly, but the satisfaction at hitting her target is there.
‘The Olympics is the pinnacle of your sporting career. To go to one was a dream. To go there in three events was massive. To get there for a second time is magical. For me, after the tough two years it’s even more special going to Paris.
‘If I rewind to August of last year, after the 400m final at the nationals, I took myself off the 4x400 relay squad because I felt I didn’t have anything to offer the girls going to the (2023) World Championships last summer.
‘Nine, ten months on I won a silver medal with the girls at the European Championships and now we are building towards the Olympics – that makes it a lot more special.
‘What I have come through, that’s a credit to the people around me, for supporting me and helping me through the tough times.’
A silver lining to those hard times is that they made her focus on life outside of athletics.
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Phil jokes that in recent years she has had to put her adult hat on, as she plans for life off the track.
She’s 29 now, turning 30 in November, and is the elder stateswoman of the Irish 4x400 women’s relay team – Phil has the edge on Sophie Becker (27), Sharlene Mawdsley (25), and Rhashidat Adeleke (21). That experience brings wisdom, and an acceptance of the sporting landscape.
‘Sport in Ireland isn’t as lucrative as it appears to be,’ she smiles.
When Sport Ireland’s 2024 International Carding Scheme was announced in February, Phil’s name wasn’t on the list. Having received €18k in the 2022 scheme, she lost her individual funding, but does come under the world class pool funding of €60k awarded to both Athletics Ireland’s 4x400m women’s and 4x400m mixed relay teams.
Still, athletics isn't Phil’s ticket to millionaire’s row, so during this Olympic cycle she decided to move from being a full-time athlete to juggling a full-time job as a software engineer with Sun Life and, as she calls it, her second full-time job: running.
‘I enjoy the balance of both,’ Phil explains.
‘Sport isn’t going to last forever and the last two years made me realise that even more. When you do go through the tougher times, the job was a blessing – it was a distraction that made me switch off from sport and focus on work.
‘You’re not going to make millions off sport, but I am so lucky to be funded and have so many great sponsors that are helping me throughout my career but sometimes you need to look at life with your adult hat on, in terms of buying a house, a pension, all these different things.
RELAY READY: Phil Healy will target an Olympic final spot.
‘I want to have the fallback of my actual career. When I retire from athletics I don’t want to be starting at the bottom of the ladder when people my age have years of work behind them.’
Having that life outside of athletics has been a blessing for Phil. She’s no longer consumed by the sport, but can now step outside the bubble and live a normal life. Her sister Joan reckons this is a game-changer for Phil, giving her the balance that she needed as she found a way out of the maze and back to fast times in straight lines, like when it all started at home on the lawn in Knockaneady racing Joan.
