Twenty years – that’s how long they’ve been working together, the vast majority of Sarah Lavin’s life. Her first memory of Noelle Morrissey was when she was seven, messing about with training partners on the frost-covered track at UL, seeing how far they could slide when Morrissey, the coach at Emerald AC, walked over the hill.

“She was roaring at me, saying, ‘You’re already messing!’” recalls Lavin. “I was like, ‘Jesus, that woman is scary.’”

The Limerick sprint hurdler didn’t know it then, but Morrissey would eventually become one of her closest friends, a coach who would guide her career to the Olympics – a mentor who would teach her far more about life than all she taught her about running.

On Saturday morning, at the Olympic Stadium in Tokyo, Lavin will walk out for the heats of the 100m hurdles and fulfil a lifelong dream.

Morrissey knows more than most what it will mean to Lavin. She had once dreamed that very same dream.

 A top-level sporting career may not be a prerequisite for a successful coach, but it certainly doesn’t do any harm. Back in the 1980s, Morrissey was one of the most exciting young talents in the country, the Nenagh native smashing underage records in sprints and hurdle events.

By the age of 15, she was already running for Ireland as a senior, charting a path that seemed destined to end at the Olympic Games.

But it doesn’t always work out.

In 1984, she was selected among a group of athletes for a warm-weather training camp in Portugal, the idea being to give them a leg up as they chased qualification for the Los Angeles Olympics.

Morrissey was 18 at the time, and intensely driven, so much that she over-trained on that camp and wound up with a stress fracture in her navicular bone shortly after her return, a fiendishly slow injury to heal given the lack of blood flow.

“I never really got back,” she says. “Back then there was no one to look after you. It’s not like now. There was no structure. If you got injured, that was the end of you.”

For the past few weeks, Lavin and Morrissey have both been at the Irish Olympic holding camp in Fukuroi, and one day there, Morrissey was asked by another team member if she’d run as a youngster. “Yeah,” she laughed. “Badly.”

Her athletics career is something she rarely talks about, and when Lavin highlights just how good her coach was back in the day, confusing the timeline slightly, Morrissey interjects. “Sarah, I was washed up by the time the ’90s came.”

She, like Lavin, was also a sprint hurdler, one who set schools and national juvenile records that stood for decades, at least until she coached Lavin to break them.

“I’m still bitter and twisted about that,” laughs Morrissey.

Does Lavin feel she benefited from Morrissey’s experience as an athlete? You bet. “Noelle is everything that she never had the opportunity to have,” she says. “That makes her such a great coach.”

“What do you mean?” asks Morrissey.

“You’re so caring for the individual, prioritising that ahead of the athlete,” adds Lavin, who then turns her focus back to the question. “She backs me as a person, first and foremost. Running will end, eventually, but the traits we have as a person are forever. I developed those because of Noelle.”

The thing is: Morrissey never had any intention to become a coach – not during her career and not for many, many years after it.

With a full-time job running the Eason’s store in Nenagh, time was long a precious commodity, and it was only while coaching her own kids at the Limerick track that she found her way into Emerald AC.

Her youngsters have grown up now, yet more than two decades on from those trips to UL, Morrissey remains. Given coaching in Ireland is often a thankless pursuit, with no financial reward and little recognition, the question is why?

“I’ve a fierce loyalty to it,” she says. “I really like the people I coach, I’m emotionally involved. I had this thing that you didn’t abandon athletes. Someone has to believe in you, to have your back at all times. If you’re bringing someone to a certain point, you better be there for them.”

It wasn’t always easy. As Lavin ascended to international class, the time commitment grew for both of them, and Morrissey sat down with her children and husband and asked, honestly, if they were happy for her to keep coaching. The answer was always yes.

With Lavin, she had a willing accomplice in their quest to reach the global level.

“I always looked at the bigger picture,” says Morrissey. “You can be good at home but that doesn’t cut it, you have to be good internationally. I set Sarah’s bar there because it’s easy to think you’re the bees knees when winning in Ireland.”

“I don’t think I ever thought that,” adds Lavin. “(At) Under-13, I was a psychopath, looking up what the best in Britain or Australia were doing. I was always aware there were people better than me.”

As Lavin made a mark internationally, winning silver at the European U-20 Championships in 2013, Morrissey committed to expand her own knowledge, reaching out to coaches abroad for mentoring in various areas.

“Noelle said, ‘Am I good enough to be at this level?’” says Lavin. “She’s measuring herself and that takes a huge humility as a coach.”

These days, Lavin is just one of her top charges, with sprinter Ciara Neville, the third fastest Irishwoman of all time, just missing out on the Olympics and fellow group members like Jamie Mitchell, Evan Crotty and Lorcan O’Connor also prominent on the national scene.

For Lavin there were many bumps along the road to Tokyo.

In 2016, her Olympic hopes were dashed when she was diagnosed with a navicular stress fracture, the same injury that derailed Morrissey’s career, and it took several years to get back to the same level.

In 2019, she finally did, running 13.26 in Geneva, but her 2020 started in disastrous fashion with three torn ligaments in her ankle.

The postponement of the Olympics proved just the lifeline she needed and Lavin coming back stronger than ever in 2021.

She reached the semi-final at the European Indoors and became just the second Irishwoman in history (after Derval O’Rourke) to break 13 seconds outdoors, clocking 12.95 in Madrid. That ensured qualification for Tokyo via her world ranking. After what she’d been through, it crowned quite the comeback.

“I never thought I wasn’t going to get back,” says Lavin.

As she prepares to get out there against the world’s best, the 27-year-old can’t help think back on where she’s come from, and all those people who helped her along the way. None more so than Morrissey.

“How many seven-year-olds start off, win an under-nine race, and make the Olympics?” she asks. “I wouldn’t be here without Noelle – that’s the bottom line.”