Rhasidat Adeleke was in a hotel in Albuquerque, New Mexico, on a Saturday evening in March this year when she faced up to some home truths about herself. She did something that day that no Irish athlete has done before. She won an individual sprint medal in the American collegiate championships, the NCAA, with silver in the 400m. Adeleke’s piece of history closed an indoor season during which she broke her own Irish 400m and 200m records.
It should have added up to satisfaction. Adeleke felt the opposite.
She didn’t run the 400m final right at the NCAA Indoors earlier that day. She didn’t pace herself the way they planned. She didn’t finish with another personal best like she wanted. She was beaten over 400m for the first time this season.
Adeleke wasn’t in the mood to pretend all was fine. Her coach, Edrick Floreal, had to convince her to go into the team photo after the University of Texas finished runners-up in the women’s team event. Photos on the college website show Adeleke didn’t mask how she really felt. Smile for the camera? When she really feels it, thanks.
All the indicators pointed to Adeleke doing everything right this year. She only started training for the 400m in October after finishing fifth in the European Championships last August. She opened 2023 with a bang (50.45), lowered her time again a few weeks later (50.33), which was the fourth fastest indoor time in the world this year. She’s only 20. What more could she have done?
More, it seems.
Adeleke told Floreal that things were going to change after they got back to their hotel in Albuquerque. She wasn’t going to complain about doing 600m reps, which she hates doing, anymore. She wasn’t going to complain about gym work, which she doesn’t like doing, anymore.
“She was p**sed and angry,” Floreal remembers. “As soon as we got back to the hotel, she was like, ‘Some things have to change. I know I need to train harder’.”
“In the past, poor performances would un-motivate me,” Adeleke says. “After a poor performance, I’d be like, ‘I don’t want to do this anymore, this sucks’, but now I’m in such a different mental space. A poor performance would motivate me even more. After that happening, I was like, ‘ok, I need to be able to be stronger when it matters’.
“Before, I wouldn’t want to do 600m or anything that long because I just wasn’t used to it. But I’m like, ‘This is what I need to get to where I want to be’. I’m going to do whatever it takes. I had that conversation with Flo. I need to do whatever it takes to be in a better position when the time comes around again.”
The Indo Daily: The Rise of Rhasidat Adeleke: The Inside Track from Texas
“She gets angry with bad performances and then raises her game,” Floreal adds. “She will train harder if she doesn’t perform well. After the indoors, she was just mad. She came to me she said, ‘I will not complain about training again’. She hates 600s. She’s like, ‘I will never open my mouth about a 600m again. I’m done. You tell me how many I’ve to do, I’m just going to do it’.
“She’s realised that these girls are much stronger. I said, ‘With your leg length, if you can have some strength, they have no chance’. She kind of admitted that she made some mistakes.
“And, so far, she’s just training with a purpose.”
Rhasidat Adeleke on campus at the University of Texas where she is combining athletics with her studies in corporate communication.
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It was a day of unseasonable thunderstorms in Austin in April when a hooded Adeleke walked into the field house of the 20,000-seater Mike A Myers Stadium where she trains. The 431-acre University of Texas (UT) campus is so vast it’s easy to get lost here. But not a talent like Adeleke. When the prestigious Texas Relays took place here the previous week, the Tallaght woman was the female athlete used in the centre of college posters to advertise the event.
It was said about Michael Phelps that he had an exemplary body shape for a swimmer with an arm span longer than his height. To meet Adeleke in person is to fully appreciate how long, as they say in America, she is. Standing 6ft tall and almost still growing into herself, Adeleke is statuesque. Everything about her covers more ground, her feet are long and narrow, her fingers are piano-esque, her stride length reminds her coach of Usain Bolt’s because “so rarely you see somebody that tall that can generate that kind of frequency or stride rate”.
Adeleke has been rewriting Irish athletics history at a phenomenal pace. When she opened her individual outdoor season last weekend by smashing her national records in the 200m (22.34) and 400m (49.90) – a time that would have placed her fourth at last year’s World Championships – it’s easy, in hindsight, to say the signs were there when we visited her in Austin earlier this month.
Her routine is to train six days a week, twice most days. Floreal thinks she’s still only “eight out of 10” when it comes to reaching her pain threshold in training, but sessions have been taking her to places her body wasn’t used to.
“When I was a short sprinter, I wouldn’t be on the ground dead not being able to breathe as often, but pretty much every single session that we do as a long sprinter, I’m like that. For about 20 minutes, I can’t get up. Everything hurts. I rethink my whole existence as a person, do I even want to do this sport anymore?” Adeleke laughs.
“But then after the pain goes away, it’s like I got some good work in. It’s definitely a lot of mental strength that it takes when you’re coming up to the 600m/500m repetitions that you have five minutes rest and you’re absolutely dead.”
A sport psychologist is available for athletes, but Adeleke doesn’t use the service. She’s trying to work it out for herself. When she first came here on scholarship in January 2021, there were performances in her freshman and sophomore years that affected her “mentally for so long”, but she’s trying to develop a “short-term memory” to quickly bin runs she’s not happy with.
“I’m hard on myself. I might be a little bit too hard on myself, but I probably used to be a lot harder on myself. Now there’s so many more races in the future that I’m hard on myself at the time, but then I move on.
“There’s always this quote that you’re not as important as you think you are. I feel like that’s important to remember because sometimes when something bad will happen or when you run slow or you don’t win, you think your whole world is crashing down. But it actually isn’t as important as you think it is.
“In the past, I’ve seen races as a threat. Like, ‘Oh, if this happens and I don’t perform to a certain expectation people would think less of me’. I think less of myself. My team-mates will think less of me. My coach will think less of me. But now I think about it as an opportunity. I can show people this is what I do. This is what I’ve been working on the past few months.”
The maturation of Adeleke has been noticed by those closest to her on the UT team. Jamaican sprinter Kevona Davis says Adeleke was initially “overwhelmed” by the attention her performances received but is handling it better. Yusuf Bizimana from London – 2023 NCAA 800m Indoor champion – is one of Adeleke’s close friends and believes she’s “almost a different person from when we started”.
“Now, she’s very driven. We have (the) Olympics around the corner, so it’s a time when she can do special things,” Bizimana says. “Definitely, the focus has shifted to be like, you know what, I want to bring something back home.”
The lead-up to next year’s Paris Olympics could see Adeleke switch lanes. Floreal believes that, by the end of this season, Adeleke could turn professional, which generally means signing a contract with a shoe company. He “wouldn’t be surprised if she gets half a million or more” per year. The way Floreal looks at it, if an athlete is offered at least three times their scholarship – he says Adeleke’s scholarship of around $70,000 (€64,000) per year adds up close to $80,000 (€73,000), including medical, travel expenses, etc – then she should take it. Floreal says UT will continue to pay for her education.
“I told her, I will keep coaching you. You’ll stay in school, nothing will change. All that changes is you’re wearing a different jersey. You have the same coach, the same training environment, the same place to eat. Nothing has changed. All that changes is when you put your jersey on it says something different than Texas. And I told her with mom and family at home, you have a responsibility to just do the very best you can. And if they’re giving you that kind of money, you’re going to have to take it. We will keep looking after you, but I’m not going to let you come back and compete for Texas and pass on that kind of money just for potentially what’s going to happen in the future.”
“There’s definitely been a lot of opportunities that’ve presented themselves, but you know it’s all about the right timing,” Adeleke adds. “If it is at the end of the season and I feel it’s the right timing, it might be something I look into. But I’ll definitely graduate. That’s something that I need to do for myself personally.”
Adeleke talks like someone now keeping pace with their rapid rise despite her relatively young age (she turns 21 on August 29). For anyone else, the mention of a tweet posted about her by multiple Olympic gold medallist Michael Johnson after the NCAA Indoors might elicit a wide-eyed response. But a smile doesn’t pass Adeleke’s face.
Instead, she’s straight into talking about improving her arm action, as Johnson pointed out. She lists all the improvements she wants to make, like becoming more tactically aware over 400m going into the outdoor season.
Yet she’s still dropping times.
Sitting inside from the rain in the fieldhouse of a huge stadium, it was hard not to escape the sense that the summer forecast is set to be hot.
Rhasidat Adeleke with her coach Edrick Floreal, who says: "She gets angry with bad performances and then raises her game.”
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In Edrick Floreal’s office on the second floor of the Frank Denius Family University of Texas Athletics Hall of Fame building is a framed picture with the words: ‘I trust the next chapter because I know the author’.
Adeleke says nearly everything Coach Flo – as he’s known – has predicted, she’s done. When he first recruited her, he forecast that she’d run under 23 seconds for the 200m. She baulked at the idea. Four months after arriving in Austin in January 2021, she ran 22.96 to break Phil Healy’s national record.
At the start of this year, her goal was to run 51 seconds for the 400m. He baulked at the idea. So she changed it to 50.8. He said it would be more like 50.4. She opened her season with 50.45.
Coaching Adeleke had been a “constant struggle”, according to Floreal, between what he thinks she can do and what she thinks she can do in training. He believes in her big potential.
“I think she can run 49.2, 49.3, if she actually runs it,” Floreal says (Shaunae Miller-Uibo won the World Championships in 49.11 last year). “The problem is it doesn’t really matter what the training says, there’s a point in the race where your mind is saying this is insanity, we need to slow down. So there’s going to be a point where she’s going to have to make a decision to sort of abort the mission and coast in, be probably about 49.9. Or push through the pain and maintain. And that’s when you have sort of the magic.”
There are 33 athletes in Flo’s training group, including collegiate sprint champion Julien Alfred who Adeleke trains with. Within the ecosystem, there’s competition. When Adeleke was deciding whether to go to last August’s Europeans after a long season, Floreal told her he would travel to Munich and be there for all her week. That helped nail the decision for her.
“She wants different things at different times. Sometimes she just wants me to yell at her and make things clear. And sometimes it’s just attention,” Floreal says. “Alpha males, as long as they get their attention, they’re great. They can coexist. Alpha females, they can coexist, but they want to know. So going to Munich was like, ‘My coach came for over a week and I had him in Munich just to take care of me. I am important’. Sometimes, I think it helps them perform better.
“She’s still in that discovery stage of finding out ‘who I am and what I do and how good I could be’. So once you figure out how good you could be and accept that, then you have to live with everybody else’s expectations of you.
“She’s not passed the first step, which is: how good am I and how good can I be? Once she figures that out and accepts it, then it’s like, ‘Oh my God, I could be the first medallist from Ireland. That would be insane’. I think that part comes second.”
Adeleke has another year and a half left of studying corporate communication and also wants to do a master’s in finance. Floreal brings up another interest of hers: modelling. He shows me a few photographs on his phone that she sent him of a recent photoshoot.
“I honestly would like to do modelling,” Adeleke smiles. “Maybe once I’m a professional athlete and I’m on a working visa and I have a bit more flexibility with my schedule. Maybe it’s something I’ll look into more.”
Floreal is currently working on her summer schedule, which he’ll have to adjust if she turns pro. There’s the NCAA outdoors on the Texas home track in June, the Irish Championships where she’ll likely run the 100m (the only Irish sprint record she currently doesn’t hold, but it’s on her radar), a few Diamond League meets and then the World Championships in Budapest in August where Floreal believes she can be a finalist and possibly a medallist.
Adeleke doesn’t speculate to accumulate when it comes to medal talk.
“I compete against myself a lot. I want to always better my last time, better my last performance. And I put a lot of pressure on myself as an athlete so when I have something in my head that I want to achieve and I don’t achieve that, it just makes me really angry.
“Why didn’t I achieve that? What could I have done differently to make sure that I achieve this certain goal? That’s what I want to try and focus on in the future.”
And what a future that could be.