Sarah Lavin continues to reach new heights in athletics despite life hurdles

Before the rain came, the conditions all over Europe were ideal. From Scandinavia down to the Mediterranean, records falling and performances of a lifetime.

When Sarah Lavin arrived at the old Olympic Stadium in Stockholm last Sunday, the seventh meeting on the Diamond League, the rain was torrential and the track was already a flood. She remained undaunted. Sweden would be special; she had a feeling.

These days whenever Lavin lines up for her event – 100 metres of track, 10 hurdles set up in the way, each one 33 inches high – she might well reflect momentarily on some of the life hurdles already overcome. Her athletic pathway from her childhood days in Limerick to her present at age 29 hasn’t always been smooth and at times her progress has stalled completely.

Diamond League lanes, in sprint events especially, are premium. Lavin got a lane in the B race; win that – which she did, clocking 12.89 seconds in the rain – and she’d go again in the headline race a couple of hours later. Sweden would be special.

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So she waited, spending an unhurried hour drying out her racing kit in the bathroom, before lining up again against the best sprint hurdlers around, including world record holder Tobi Amusan from Nigeria.

The rain eased and, with the track still wet and racing in lane one, Lavin nailed second place, just behind Amusan. Her time of 12.73 seconds was a personal best, achieved despite clipping the last hurdle. It improved her previous best of 12.79, clocked on route to the European final in Munich last August. She is within touching distance of Derval O’Rourke’s Irish record of 12.65, set 13 years ago when winning the European silver medal in Barcelona.

In the process Lavin defeated reigning European champion Pia Skrzyszowska from Poland, third in 12.78, plus World indoor runner-up Devynne Charlton of the Bahamas.

Then, in a series of interviews, Lavin made it clear why Sweden was so special, referencing the special help she was getting from “up there”, pointing to the sky, her eyes not quite a flood of tears, the emotion visible nonetheless.

It’s not yet three months since the tragic death of her boyfriend, the Waterford rally driver Craig Breen, who sustained fatal injuries during a practice run at an event in Croatia, on April 13th. He was 33 years old. Just two months previously Breen had finished second in the Swedish Rally after one of the drives of his life.

It was a loss as sudden as it was inconceivable.

Lavin might well have opted out for some or even all of the season. Instead she is rising to this tragic life hurdle, knowing that’s exactly what Breen would have wished. Her 12.73 also makes her the first Irish automatic qualifier for the track or field for next summer’s Paris Olympics (inside the 12.77) since the window opened on July 1st, and that’s one less hurdle to worry about. Her previous Olympic experiences will always remind her of that.

There is perhaps some sense of destiny in her chosen event. Lavin was, by cosmic coincidence, born on the same day as O’Rourke, 13 years later. In 2013, her last year as a junior, she also broke both O’Rourke’s Irish junior records, indoors and out - her 13.34 outdoors also earned her the silver medal at the European Juniors in Rieti, Italy.

[ Derval O’Rourke: This pasta e piselli is a family favourite I first ate when I was racing in Italy ]

Like O’Rourke she was always an extremely high achiever, but her first move out of the junior ranks hit a sort of hurdle too. She went straight from school in Limerick to the hallowed halls of the Ivy League, attending Princeton University in New Jersey for one term before sensing that might impact on her athletic ambitions, a realisation that made her start back in UCD.

In 2014, at age 20, she improved her best to 13.23, putting the Rio Olympics, two years later, unquestionably within reach. Only she reached out too far, Lavin succumbing to over-training and under-eating, developing the often crippling condition known as relative energy deficiency in sport (Red-S). By June 2016, instead of chasing the Olympic standard, she was nursing a stress fracture in her foot.

She has admitted she should have known better too: in her final year of physiotherapy studies at UCD, she’d sit in lectures and hear about some of the warning signs of Red-S and the potential for weakened bones and joints.

Rising again with Tokyo 2020 on the horizon, she ran 13.26 in 2019, her fastest time in five years, won a fifth National 100m hurdles title, and finished a close fourth at the World University Games in Naples. Tokyo was calling.

Only then, in her first indoor race of the Olympic season, she gently misjudged her footing after crossing the line and pulling up on the banked curve that helps slow the sprinters down. A simple misstep, a complete freak of an injury, tearing three ankle ligaments and facing a 12-week layoff at the very least.

Had Tokyo not been postponed a year, due to Covid, there’s little chance she would have made it, despite training throughout the lockdown on a small section of track set up in the back garden of her family home in Limerick.

After she made Tokyo, in 2021, there was still that sense she had and wanted more. Last season proved as much, as she first made the final of the 60m hurdles at the World Indoor Championships, then the final at European Championships in Munich, where she finished just outside the medals in fifth, before making another European Indoor final in Istanbul earlier this year.

Then, in not straightforward circumstances perhaps in tune with her career, she won her first senior medal, bronze at the European Games in Poland last month. She won Ireland’s European Team Championships, in the third division, in a time of 12.82 and that subsequently proved to be the third-best outright across all divisions, so she was confirmed as a medal winner three days after her race was over.

She’ll run the Morton Games in Santry next Friday evening before building towards the biggest sprint hurdles race of the summer at the World Athletics Championships in Budapest in August. The only previous Irish finalist on that stage was O’Rourke, who finished fourth in Berlin in 2009, in a then Irish record of 12.67.

For Lavin that’s just another hurdle to rise above.