Adeleke is joint winner of Irish Athlete of the Year

Sprinter Rhasidat Adeleke and Ciara Mageean were announced as joint Athlete of the Year, and most people sat there thinking that one accolade divided into two was fair enough.

It was the first time two women athletes shared this one accolade, fitting given the similar heights reached by both Mageean and Adeleke over the year, including their fourth-place finishes at the World Championships during those hot nights in Budapest last August.

Both also found ample success elsewhere, Mageean twice improving her own Irish 1,500m record as well as adding the mile and 800m records, and Adeleke repeatedly rewriting the Irish marks over 200m and 400m, indoors and then out.

She ended up breaking seven senior records in all, which also doubled as Irish under-23 records, making for a grand tally of 14. And all while still aged 20, the obvious feeling being that it’s only a matter of time before she wins this award outright.

For reasons not yet entirely clear, World Athletics went one better again last week, announcing a sort of three-way tie for both their men’s and women’s awards. So for the first time since starting up in 1988 – when Carl Lewis and Florence Griffith Joyner were joint winners, there was no individual accolade for Athlete of the Year.

Despite giving no warning of the move, World Athletics had chosen to introduce new separate awards for track, field, and out-of-stadia, for both men and women.

Faith Kipyegon and Noah Lyles won the track award, pole vaulter Mondo Duplantis and triple jumper Yulimar Rojas won the field award, and the non-stadia accolades went to the men’s and women’s recent world marathon record breakers, Kelvin Kiptum and Tigist Assefa.

Michael Johnson that evening said on Twitter/X, “Am I the only person who thinks having six athletes of the year is a bad idea?”

Lyles agreed on that, the American sprinter hardly disguising his disbelief when sharing the spotlight with five other athletes.

“When they decided to split the award without telling any of us, including the fans that voted, it made me feel that none of our achievements were good enough,” Lyles said.

It can be particularly hard to compare athletic feats in different disciplines, especially when a pole vault World champion such as Duplantis can only win medals in one event, while Lyles and Kipyegon could win medals in two or three. Still, you’d never see that at the Oscars, and all it felt like a watered-down production in the end.