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December’s Irish Times/Sport Ireland Women’s Athlete Awards: Eilish and Roisin Flanagan (Athletics).
After Amy Broadhurst won our 2022 overall award, the applause barely stopped as we set off again, this time entering the 20th year of the Female Athlete of the Year award.
We are now in a field where when we started in the hazy and distant past in 2004, our monthly winners weren’t even born and only one of the 12 winners from that year was still doing hers Sports – You may have heard of her: Cora Staunton.
As always, we begin our annual awards ceremony by honoring the last month of the previous year, and an outstanding performance from December 2022 was certainly an outstanding bronze medal for our senior team at the European Cross Country Championships in Italy.
Losing Fionnuala McCormack and Ciara Mageean, expectations weren’t the highest, but then Eilish and Roisin Flanagan led the team home with excellent 11th and 12th, the Tyrone twins timed the same and Eilish was a late replacement for the injured Mageean .
Mary Mulhare’s stellar final lap performance gave her a top 30 finish and a bronze medal for Team Ann Marie McGlynn, the oldest competitor in the race at 42 years old, just four places behind her teammate.
Aoibhe Richardson and Michelle Finn were also part of the fine team that led Ireland to a very successful tournament, winning five medals enough to place them joint second with Spain and France in the overall standings, with Nick Griggs and Dean Casey won silver and bronze in the Junior Boys competition, helping Ireland to silver in the team event.
The women’s combined effort was enough to give Spain a five-point lead, with Germany taking gold and Great Britain taking silver.
The Flanagan sisters were part of the Under-23 team that won silver in Lisbon in 2019 and are now at Adams College in Colorado.
Eilish competed in the 3,000-meter obstacle course at the Tokyo Olympics, a trip McGlynn missed because she was just 4 seconds short of qualifying for the marathon. If she thought this might be the end of her successful international days, well, she was wrong.
A strong team effort, and a shiny medal as a reward.
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