Olympics 2024: Team Ireland Results FINAL DAY
By Heather Boyle, OFI Head of Communications & Sinéad Naughton, OFI Media Liaison.
Sunday 11th August 2024
ATHLETICS
Becoming the first Irish woman ever to compete at five Olympic Games Team Ireland’s Fionnuala McCormack finished 28th in the Women’s Marathon around the streets of Paris this morning.
The Wicklow woman ran a typically strong race, moving up the field throughout and left everything out on the course, as she became Ireland’s first ever five-time female Olympian; having made her Olympic debut in Beijing sixteen years ago.
McCormack’s time of 2:30:12 in the searing Parisian heat was impressive as she battled through a particularly demanding course, containing two particularly tough hills, the second of which (a 436m climb) she described as ‘torture’.
Speaking afterwards Kilcoole AC’s McCormack was slightly disappointed, and as ever was modest about what she had achieved.
TRACK CYCLING
Track cyclist Lara Gillespie closed out the Paris 2024 Olympic Games for Team Ireland with a 10th place finish in the final event at the Velodrome; the Women’s Omnium.
Lara Gillespie helped Team Ireland leave Paris 2024 on a high with a brilliantly gutsy top 10 finish in the gruelling Omnium event at the Saint-Quentin-en Yvelines National Velodrome.
The 23-year-old from Enniskerry was briefly in fourth place at one stage of the Points race, the final element of track cycling’s testing four-race multi-sport event.
Given her youth, and the quality and experience of most of the rest of the 22-woman field, Gillespie, a European U23 champion in Omnium and Points last year, produced a truly stellar performance.
She was Team Ireland’s last competitor in action but utterly focussed on the final day and admitted she had even loftier ambitions but just ran out of gas at the end.
Gillespie was 15th in the first element - the 30-lap 7.5km Scratch Race – but made a sensational start to the second ‘Tempo’ race, by lapping the entire field to pick up 20 points, which, added to an intermediate sprint victory, won her 24 points and the overall race.
That courage paid huge dividends as her Tempo victory leapfrogged her from 15th to sixth place overall.
Finishing ninth in the third ‘Elimination’ event then moved her to fifth overall, just 20 points adrift of the Canadian who was lying in the bronze medal position.
The final Points race - a gruelling 80-lap battle with points for intermediate sprints every 10 laps and more 20-point bonuses available for lapping the field – was typically frantic and full of attacks.
Gillespie put herself in a brilliant position halfway through it, lapping the field again for another 20-point bonus to move into fourth place on 99 points, just three off the bronze medal.
But as more and more riders continued to attack the effort finally caught up with her and that was her final total; 26 points off what eventually clinched bronze.
Her individual performance capped a brilliant Olympic debut as she was also part of the Irish team that finished ninth in Team Pursuit and 11th in the Madison.