Rhasidat Adeleke stood on the winner’s podium for the second time in two days at the European U-20 Championships in Tallinn last weekend but this time it got to her. She had just completed the deal she made with herself. She had done the double with gold medals in the 100m and 200m and iced the weekend by breaking her own national senior record in the 200m.
Her mum, Adewumi, and her brother, Abdullahi, were also in the Kadriorg Stadium. When Rhasidat hugged Adewumi after the 200m win she knew the pride and delight her mum felt but there was also a mother’s upset that her daughter had lost out on another dream a few weeks previously.
Two days after the National Track and Field Championships last month, Rhasidat got a phone call and an email to inform her she had not been selected for the mixed 4x400m relay team for the Tokyo Olympics. Adeleke is 18 – she’s 19 next month – so she’s not backed by years of senior international experience in an event she doesn’t usually compete in, but her times this season don’t lie.
Two weeks before the Nationals, Rhasidat recorded a 50.96 split when she ran a leg of the 4x400m relay for her college, the University of Texas at Austin, at the NCAA Championships in Oregon. Her split was faster than any other time posted by an Irish female athlete over 400m this year.
Logic would say she was surely on track for one of the three female places in the Olympic mixed relay team. But she wasn’t one of the chosen ones. She had 24 hours to decide if she wanted to appeal the decision.
Rhasidat (pronounced: Ra-she-dah) didn’t run the 400m at Nationals because she hadn’t given up on qualifying for the 200m at the Olympics.
She was competing for her college until mid-June, so she couldn’t run in events in Europe where points for the ranking system for Olympic qualification were higher. She won her first national senior outdoor title in the 100m at Nationals and Phil Healy beat her into second in the 200m.
“A lot of people were saying: why didn’t I do the 400m? But that would have been me giving up on myself and giving up on my ability to actually qualify individually. I don’t regret not doing the 400m because I believed that I could get it (the 200m qualifier). The rule was if you compete at Nationals in any event, you can still get selected. I didn’t really see it as a fall-back (the mixed relay) because I was actually hoping to go for the 200m and the 4x4,” Rhasidat said this week. “If I ran my races in Europe, I definitely would have got to the Olympics for the 200m. The competitions in the US weren’t worth a lot of ranking points. I just think the ranking system, it’s a bit skewed towards the . . . look, I don’t want to sound bitter or anything.”
Rhasidat decided to appeal the decision by Athletics Ireland not to select her in the relay. Phil Healy and Cliodhna Manning, who finished first and second in the 400m final at Nationals, were picked as well as Sophie Becker who had one of the fastest times in an individual 400m this year when she recorded a new personal best of 52.32 at the end of May.
But with that 50.96 split time in Oregon just two weeks before Nationals, Rhasidat felt she had a case and appealed. “It got through the three rounds of the appeal but first they have to actually recognise that there’s a reason to appeal, that there’s been a fault in the process. And then they have to regroup and have the hearing again. So they recognised that there was a fault in the selection policy. So there was definitely a reason that it was incorrect basically.”
But she lost her appeal. “I was a little bit disappointed but at the same time I wasn’t surprised, to be honest, because it was gonna go back to the same selectors who made the original decision. And if they didn’t pick me the first time, even though I had so much evidence on my side, I was like, you know what, they probably won’t pick me again because they’ve got their reasons.”
Rhasidat says losing out on a place in the Olympics was “kind of” a motivating factor when she went to the European U20s. It was there that she doubled down on her potential as a generational talent in Irish athletics. She originally planned on just doing the 200m, but the day before she decided to do the 100m as well but on the condition to herself that she won both.
“I probably put more pressure on myself than anyone else. I’m really, really competitive. Especially if I’m ranked number one. I just would be destroyed if anyone was to beat me. I’ve just always, always strived for success. I felt like it was in my blood like,” Rhasidat says. “My mum is really driven. She wants us to be successful but I think it’s largely my own perspective.”
It’s her mum who gives everything to help Rhasidat give her all as an athlete. It’s her mum – who moved from Nigeria to Tallaght 23 years ago – who she reckons she got the athletics gene from as Adewumi used to do the long jump. It’s her mum who reschedules her work hours so she can bring her daughter to training, travel with her to competitions and who has her meals ready for her at home.
It was her mum who knew that within the incredible feat of winning two European gold medals was the hurt of missing out on Tokyo. “Yeah, she was really, really disappointed. She was kind of like angry. When we were in Tallinn, she just burst over and she was like, ‘see, you’ve got 10,000 other things coming your way.’”
It was Rhasidat’s move in January to Texas on an athletics scholarship – where she studies economics – that’s been the point of difference this season. Her coach at Tallaght AC, Daniel Kilgallon, developed her talent through her teenage years and it’s been her collegiate coach at Texas, Edrick Floreal, who’s brought her to the next level.
Floreal told her on the phone even before she moved to Texas that she would go sub-23 in the 200m this year. Her PB had been 23.52 from when she was 15. Then she ran 22.96 – a new national record – in Manhattan in May and lowered it to 22.90 in Tallinn last Saturday. Floreal was right.
“He just knows, everyone says ‘Flo knows’. I achieved exactly that he said I would achieve. I always trust him but I trust him even more now because he knows me, maybe even better than I know myself.”
Rhasidat and her coach have talked about her moving up to the 400m at some stage in the future and her devastating potential over this distance is obvious. Even after her 100m and 200m wins last weekend, the way she hunted down the leaders over the first 300m in the final leg of the 4x400m relay last Sunday was breath-taking.
The six rounds of running from the previous days caught up with her in the home straight but she still recorded the fastest split time in the race which further exposed Athletics Ireland’s decision not to select her for the relay in Tokyo.
Sonia O’Sullivan was in her corner, she tweeted: “This will be looked back upon as one of the worst decisions ever made by @athleticsireland, clearly one of the current best Irish athletes, an outlier where exceptions should be made...”
Sonia had got in touch personally with Rhasidat when the athletics team for Tokyo was announced on July 8 and she wasn’t in it. “Sonia is such a lovely person. She messaged me after the selection came out and she was expressing her feelings, just trying to motivate me to keep going. Yeah, that was great to see the support from Sonia. To know that she has the same viewpoint as me was great.”
As well as Sonia, the support Rhasidat got from the Irish public after her double gold took her aback. “It’s amazing that I can make so many people proud. It’s a great feeling that I can do it not only for myself but for my nation. I just hope I can continue to make people proud and continue to put on these performances and even help boost Ireland, put Ireland on the map. Because we’re there.”
Rhasidat says she would have loved the pressure to perform at the Olympics and believes there were even faster times in her this summer. Instead, her season is over and she’ll watch Tokyo from her family home in Tallaght before returning to Texas later next month. But she’ll start tracking Paris 2024. Stay fit and healthy and anything is possible with her in the future. The teenager from Tallaght is fast becoming one of the great hopes in Irish sport.