THE PHOTOGRAPHER GETS into position to capture the scene. He lies down on his flat, nudges the camera under the fish netting and directs the woman inside the concrete circle with the metal apparatus by her side.
Two swings gets the 4kg ball up in the air. And then it’s into the rotations where her outstretched arms keep the ball in flight. One rotation after another.
Turn. Turn. Turn. Turn. Whirl. Whirl. Whirl.
It becomes a tornado of movement. A powerful balance of arms, legs, wire and ball propelling each other in circular motion.
And then her foot lands outside the circle. The ball floats down to a soft landing. The movement stops. The noise fades. Normally, there’s a launch at the end of the fourth turn. And she can send that ball over 70 metres.
On the day The 42 calls to visit, Nicola Tuthill has already packed in over 40 throws from the homemade hammer throw cage beside her family home in Kilbrittain, West Cork. There’s plenty of online clips that show the final product of her routine.
Her ninth-place finish at the 2024 European Championships. Narrowly missing out on a place in the final at the Paris Olympics later that year. 11th at last year’s World Championships. All before reaching the age of 22. That’s all documented elsewhere.
Today, though, the photographer just needs a few demonstration shots. He tries several angles to get the right picture. And then a few more. And a few more. More turning.
Looking for a different image of this woman at work, he starts walking down the field, scoping out the typical landing zone for those big throws. He pulls up at a certain point and turns back towards the cage.
“Em . . . you’ll have to move back further than that.”
Ireland hammer throw athlete Nicola Tuthill. Martin Walsh
Martin Walsh
Turn 1
The kettle boils as Nicola’s mother Collette describes the origins of the hammer throw cage in the field on their dairy farm. A lunchbox packed with biscuits slides across the table for the mug of coffee that follows.
The old arrangement just wasn’t working any more. When Nicola first started throwing the hammer, she trained in the cage at Bandon AC. Sisters Aoife and Olivia were often brought along, sitting in the back of the car doing their homework.
They had their own interests too, and Collette did all the driving to keep all three schedules on the road.
“We were all doing similar sports,” Nicola continues. “But we also all had different sports, so I’d be training, the two girls would be in the car doing their homework, and then there’d be other times where maybe all of us would be training at the same time, and she’d be running here, there and everywhere, trying to keep up with us all.
“She played a massive role.”
Collette knew the benefits of being involved in sport after years spent playing camogie and hockey. And like her daughters, she also dabbled in athletics.
She came up with a workaround for Nicola’s needs in 2019. She handed over the construction plans for a hammer throw cage to her husband, Norman. They had help from neighbours and workers on the farm to get the project done. All in, the work took about two days to complete.
The fish netting that surrounds the cage came from Schull, a seaside village in West Cork. That’s been topped up since. More concrete has been poured in front of the circle too, and a stone path has been added just outside to cut across the grass, and create a link with the laneway that leads up to their house.
Nicola Tuthill and her father, Norman, building the hammer throw cage beside their home. Nicola Tuthill
Nicola Tuthill
Nicola was involved too, surveying her Dad and blessing the work.
“I was probably just sitting there annoying him probably,” she laughs. “It’s really nice to have that photo to look back on, the day it was built, that dad was there, I think he was floating the circle, making sure it was all level, and I was kind of sitting there watching on.”
Turn 2
“11th in the world is crazy but to not be over 70 metres is a little bit upsetting. It wasn’t there on the day. I’ve been consistent over 70, I think I’ve done it maybe seven times this year so knowing I wanted to do that is kinda tough but I was 11th; I can’t complain.”
Nicola Tuthill, RTÉ, September 2025
She knew she had to be happy. Finishing 11th at her first World Championships in Tokyo last year was a brilliant achievement. The latest milestone in an athletics career that continues to soar. Hammer throw athletes tend to peak at an older age but she’s clearly suited to life at elite level. Even if she is ahead of schedule.
Tuthill also had some big debuts in 2024. She went to her first European Championships in Rome where she finished ninth, and her maiden Olympics in Paris saw her take 16th. She was the youngest competitor in the field on that occasion, narrowly missing out on a place in the final by just 1.16m.
“2024 was quite a breakthrough year, as my first year competing individually as a senior at European Championships and then Paris after that.
“That made me hungry for more and I was doing all the work and training so I knew that the possibility to make these major championships was there and having gone to them, it gave me a taste for more. As you’re getting older, everything improves – your technique, strength, power, speed and nutrition.
“All of these little one per centers every year, making those small gains and I think they’re all adding up now.”
Her most recent achievement was a silver medal at the European Throwing Cup in March where she managed a new personal best throw of 72.48m despite only recently returning from injury. A torn muscle attached to her collarbone sidelined her for five weeks but she managed to get some training in before the event in Cyprus.
“I had actually thrown a 72m that week in training. That was a really long time coming.”
She’s now in the mainframe for Eileen O’Keeffe’s national senior record of 73.21m. The Kilkenny woman has become something of a mentor for Tuthill, helping her navigate a road that she once walked.
“She’s really lovely,” Tuthill says.
“I’m really hard on myself. She says to always enjoy the process. She’ll message me after big competitions, or if she sees that I’m after making a big throw, she’ll give me a good text and say, ‘Well done.’”
The heights that Tuthill is scaling now can be traced back to a conversation at a neighbour’s communion party.
She was already involved in athletics at that stage and was focusing mainly on cross-country running. She started throwing the hammer at around 12, but the path ahead wasn’t clear for her in that event.
Nicola Tuthill at the Paris Olympics in 2024. Ryan Byrne / INPHO
Ryan Byrne / INPHO / INPHO
Also attending that communion party was a man called Kevin Warner, who used to be hammer thrower. He offered to be her first coach. It’s difficult to tell if another avenue into the cage would have come along, but that meeting remains a crucial plot point in her story.
“Chances are, I probably would have stuck with the running if I didn’t give it a go and properly start training for it. That neighbour will still text me.
“I’ll call up when I win a medal or something like that. I’ll call up to the house because when I was younger, that was a tradition. He’ll still text me and say, ‘well done.’ He’ll be following along, which is nice.
“But definitely, it could have gone either way at the time, and I’m very lucky it went the way it did.”
Tuthill continued with her running, eventually switching to shorter distances where an emphasis on speed and power brought more benefits to her throwing. But by the time the hammer throw cage was built in 2019, running was gradually phased out.
Her first taste of international competition that year made the final decision for her.
“I did the Schools International with the hammer, and having that small taster . . . ‘This is something that I could potentially do again, and again, and at a higher level.’
She was just 16 when she won her first senior gold medal at the 2020 national athletics championships. Her winning throw of 60.04m made her just the sixth Irish woman to exceed the 60m distance.
“I was starting to dream a little. That year, I’d qualified for European U18s, but they were cancelled because of Covid. That would have been my first time hitting a European standard, and I think that was kind of when I was like, ‘I’m still quite young, and this is a possibility now.’
“Having won that first national title at 16, I threw 60 metres, which would have been quite a big throw for a 16-year-old, so that was another confidence booster that I’d made the right choice.”
Turn 3
We step back into house after the photo shoot in the hammer throw cage. Katie the dog is there to greet us. Off go the shoes that Tuthill was using in the circle. Hammer throw shoes don’t tend to last long as they are built for speed and rotation. She goes through about eight pairs a year.
Tape is another precious resource: it’s needed for her fingers during competition. A roll of that could be gone in a week. The 4kg ball mentioned earlier is only used for competition. Tuthill typically trains with a 5kg ball which she can hurl over 60m.
We walk through the various rooms of their lovely home. A clothes horse then appears with Ireland gear draped across the bars.
Tuthill during a throw at the 2024 European Championships in Rome. Morgan Treacy / INPHO
Morgan Treacy / INPHO / INPHO
The walls are beautifully decorated in pictures that tell the story of Tuthill’s rise.
There’s one photo of her standing with Olympic silver-medallist Sonia O’Sullivan. And another with Rob Heffernan, the walker who won a bronze medal at the London 2012 Games.
Nicola’s sisters are up there on the walls too, all of their achievements sitting side by side in frames. Olivia, the eldest, is heavily involved in dancing while the youngest daughter, Aoife, is a great singer. They both tried athletics in their younger years and have thrown the hammer once or twice.
“I’ve made them both throw it on the odd occasion,” Tuthill laughs. “Just for fun.”
“I love that we all get on really well, and we’re sisters, but we’re also best friends, which is nice, that we can kind of talk to each other about things.”
Olivia coaches at the RD Dance academy where all three sisters tried hip hop, commercial and freestyle forms of dancing.
“I wasn’t the best in comparison to my siblings, hence why it got the boot,” Tuthill continues. “But I enjoyed it.”
Tuthill had other interests she had to leave behind as her athletics career started to pick up speed. Two gorgeous ponies on her father’s farm, Holly and Polo, symbolise her love of horse riding. She still goes on hacks with her friends when she has time.
The cows and calves are nearby too in the various sheds around the farmyard. At peak times, some 200 cows pass through the milking parlour which is also on site. The Tuthill farm was featured on an episode of RTÉ’s Ear To The Ground in the aftermath of the Paris Olympics.
“It’s brilliant, but she’s still Nicola,” her proud father Norman said during the episode, with Nicola smiling beside him. Along with building the hammer cage for his daughter, he helps with the repair work too whenever a wire snaps or a handle breaks.
Not everyone can travel with Tuthill when she’s competing abroad but her Olympics debut in Paris was a major family occasion.
“It was really nice that a lot of my family were able to go, and a few of my friends were able to go out as well, which was really nice. When I came out after competing, they were all there.”
Turn 4
Tuthill talking to her coach Killian Barry at the Paris Olympics. Ryan Byrne / INPHO
Ryan Byrne / INPHO / INPHO
The wait to discover whether or not she had made the 2025 world final was torture. Tuthill sat in the stands beside her coach, Killian Barry, watching each effort intently.
After two bad throws, Tuthill launched herself into contention with a 70.7m beamer. That put her in sixth place with another group of throwers to follow. Only the top 12 could progress to the final.
“Did they pass me?”
“Did they not?”
Patience is a major requirement for hammer throw athletes. That particular day started at 6.30am for Tuthill with a warm-up before heading for the call room an hour later. Athletes do what they can to kill time.
“Some people will be chatting,” Tuthill adds. “Some people won’t talk. I’ll talk when someone talks to me.”
The wait between turns is lengthy too. But Tuthill and Barry make good use of that time to assess the throw she cannot change and reset for the next one. It’s how they navigated that nervy wait for the final which she did reach in Tokyo, and it’s how they responded from her first throw at the Paris Olympics.
“I caged my first throw and my last session beforehand, I was in tears. It was not a good day for me. And then I fouled my first throw into the net, and there’s only two more then. It’s the biggest stage.
“So, it was kind of prime position for me to panic but I think I know myself that all the work had been done and I was able to go back to Killian and he was like, ‘Well actually, it was just this tiny thing you did wrong and you know how to fix that. You’ll be fine.’”
Training follows a similar pattern. Barry is a native of Dublin and has moved to Cork. But even though he lives in Tuthill’s home county, he can’t always be around. He empowers her to run her own show.
“He’s very calm. If things are going wrong he’ll know not to panic, because if he panics I panic.
“He wants me to be able to see the corrections myself and, as an athlete, you need to have a good awareness of the technique yourself. If there’s sessions that he’s not there for, I need to be able to work on things, and know that this felt wrong. And I’ll take videos myself. I go to competitions sometimes by myself, so just that you know how to fix things.”
****
Tuthill is always looking for more. More progress. More championships. More PBs. More improvements in her technique. She finds joy in looking for new ways to finesse her form. At the moment, she’s focusing on the minutiae of the entry point in her routine.
“If you had nothing to improve, then where are you going?” she says.
That 73m national record is in her sights too, along with the European Championships which will be her headline event of 2026. She has college to balance with all that too, and is currently on teaching placement in Dublin.
Always chasing the high of a good turn. And all that comes with it.
“It doesn’t happen that often, where you’re genuinely excited. ‘Oh my God, I’ve thrown that.’ It’s not like you go out every week and PB. So, those kind of times when you do, it’s always special.”
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'Hungry for more' - a day spent with one of Ireland's most exciting Olympians
THE PHOTOGRAPHER GETS into position to capture the scene. He lies down on his flat, nudges the camera under the fish netting and directs the woman inside the concrete circle with the metal apparatus by her side.
Two swings gets the 4kg ball up in the air. And then it’s into the rotations where her outstretched arms keep the ball in flight. One rotation after another.
Turn. Turn. Turn. Turn. Whirl. Whirl. Whirl.
It becomes a tornado of movement. A powerful balance of arms, legs, wire and ball propelling each other in circular motion.
And then her foot lands outside the circle. The ball floats down to a soft landing. The movement stops. The noise fades. Normally, there’s a launch at the end of the fourth turn. And she can send that ball over 70 metres.
On the day The 42 calls to visit, Nicola Tuthill has already packed in over 40 throws from the homemade hammer throw cage beside her family home in Kilbrittain, West Cork. There’s plenty of online clips that show the final product of her routine.
Her ninth-place finish at the 2024 European Championships. Narrowly missing out on a place in the final at the Paris Olympics later that year. 11th at last year’s World Championships. All before reaching the age of 22. That’s all documented elsewhere.
Today, though, the photographer just needs a few demonstration shots. He tries several angles to get the right picture. And then a few more. And a few more. More turning.
Looking for a different image of this woman at work, he starts walking down the field, scoping out the typical landing zone for those big throws. He pulls up at a certain point and turns back towards the cage.
“Em . . . you’ll have to move back further than that.”
Turn 1
The kettle boils as Nicola’s mother Collette describes the origins of the hammer throw cage in the field on their dairy farm. A lunchbox packed with biscuits slides across the table for the mug of coffee that follows.
The old arrangement just wasn’t working any more. When Nicola first started throwing the hammer, she trained in the cage at Bandon AC. Sisters Aoife and Olivia were often brought along, sitting in the back of the car doing their homework.
They had their own interests too, and Collette did all the driving to keep all three schedules on the road.
“We were all doing similar sports,” Nicola continues. “But we also all had different sports, so I’d be training, the two girls would be in the car doing their homework, and then there’d be other times where maybe all of us would be training at the same time, and she’d be running here, there and everywhere, trying to keep up with us all.
“She played a massive role.”
Collette knew the benefits of being involved in sport after years spent playing camogie and hockey. And like her daughters, she also dabbled in athletics.
She came up with a workaround for Nicola’s needs in 2019. She handed over the construction plans for a hammer throw cage to her husband, Norman. They had help from neighbours and workers on the farm to get the project done. All in, the work took about two days to complete.
The fish netting that surrounds the cage came from Schull, a seaside village in West Cork. That’s been topped up since. More concrete has been poured in front of the circle too, and a stone path has been added just outside to cut across the grass, and create a link with the laneway that leads up to their house.
Nicola was involved too, surveying her Dad and blessing the work.
“I was probably just sitting there annoying him probably,” she laughs. “It’s really nice to have that photo to look back on, the day it was built, that dad was there, I think he was floating the circle, making sure it was all level, and I was kind of sitting there watching on.”
Turn 2
“11th in the world is crazy but to not be over 70 metres is a little bit upsetting. It wasn’t there on the day. I’ve been consistent over 70, I think I’ve done it maybe seven times this year so knowing I wanted to do that is kinda tough but I was 11th; I can’t complain.”
Nicola Tuthill, RTÉ, September 2025
She knew she had to be happy. Finishing 11th at her first World Championships in Tokyo last year was a brilliant achievement. The latest milestone in an athletics career that continues to soar. Hammer throw athletes tend to peak at an older age but she’s clearly suited to life at elite level. Even if she is ahead of schedule.
Tuthill also had some big debuts in 2024. She went to her first European Championships in Rome where she finished ninth, and her maiden Olympics in Paris saw her take 16th. She was the youngest competitor in the field on that occasion, narrowly missing out on a place in the final by just 1.16m.
“2024 was quite a breakthrough year, as my first year competing individually as a senior at European Championships and then Paris after that.
“That made me hungry for more and I was doing all the work and training so I knew that the possibility to make these major championships was there and having gone to them, it gave me a taste for more. As you’re getting older, everything improves – your technique, strength, power, speed and nutrition.
“All of these little one per centers every year, making those small gains and I think they’re all adding up now.”
Her most recent achievement was a silver medal at the European Throwing Cup in March where she managed a new personal best throw of 72.48m despite only recently returning from injury. A torn muscle attached to her collarbone sidelined her for five weeks but she managed to get some training in before the event in Cyprus.
“I had actually thrown a 72m that week in training. That was a really long time coming.”
She’s now in the mainframe for Eileen O’Keeffe’s national senior record of 73.21m. The Kilkenny woman has become something of a mentor for Tuthill, helping her navigate a road that she once walked.
“She’s really lovely,” Tuthill says.
“I’m really hard on myself. She says to always enjoy the process. She’ll message me after big competitions, or if she sees that I’m after making a big throw, she’ll give me a good text and say, ‘Well done.’”
The heights that Tuthill is scaling now can be traced back to a conversation at a neighbour’s communion party.
She was already involved in athletics at that stage and was focusing mainly on cross-country running. She started throwing the hammer at around 12, but the path ahead wasn’t clear for her in that event.
Also attending that communion party was a man called Kevin Warner, who used to be hammer thrower. He offered to be her first coach. It’s difficult to tell if another avenue into the cage would have come along, but that meeting remains a crucial plot point in her story.
“Chances are, I probably would have stuck with the running if I didn’t give it a go and properly start training for it. That neighbour will still text me.
“I’ll call up when I win a medal or something like that. I’ll call up to the house because when I was younger, that was a tradition. He’ll still text me and say, ‘well done.’ He’ll be following along, which is nice.
“But definitely, it could have gone either way at the time, and I’m very lucky it went the way it did.”
Tuthill continued with her running, eventually switching to shorter distances where an emphasis on speed and power brought more benefits to her throwing. But by the time the hammer throw cage was built in 2019, running was gradually phased out.
Her first taste of international competition that year made the final decision for her.
“I did the Schools International with the hammer, and having that small taster . . . ‘This is something that I could potentially do again, and again, and at a higher level.’
She was just 16 when she won her first senior gold medal at the 2020 national athletics championships. Her winning throw of 60.04m made her just the sixth Irish woman to exceed the 60m distance.
“I was starting to dream a little. That year, I’d qualified for European U18s, but they were cancelled because of Covid. That would have been my first time hitting a European standard, and I think that was kind of when I was like, ‘I’m still quite young, and this is a possibility now.’
“Having won that first national title at 16, I threw 60 metres, which would have been quite a big throw for a 16-year-old, so that was another confidence booster that I’d made the right choice.”
Turn 3
We step back into house after the photo shoot in the hammer throw cage. Katie the dog is there to greet us. Off go the shoes that Tuthill was using in the circle. Hammer throw shoes don’t tend to last long as they are built for speed and rotation. She goes through about eight pairs a year.
Tape is another precious resource: it’s needed for her fingers during competition. A roll of that could be gone in a week. The 4kg ball mentioned earlier is only used for competition. Tuthill typically trains with a 5kg ball which she can hurl over 60m.
We walk through the various rooms of their lovely home. A clothes horse then appears with Ireland gear draped across the bars.
The walls are beautifully decorated in pictures that tell the story of Tuthill’s rise.
There’s one photo of her standing with Olympic silver-medallist Sonia O’Sullivan. And another with Rob Heffernan, the walker who won a bronze medal at the London 2012 Games.
Nicola’s sisters are up there on the walls too, all of their achievements sitting side by side in frames. Olivia, the eldest, is heavily involved in dancing while the youngest daughter, Aoife, is a great singer. They both tried athletics in their younger years and have thrown the hammer once or twice.
“I’ve made them both throw it on the odd occasion,” Tuthill laughs. “Just for fun.”
“I love that we all get on really well, and we’re sisters, but we’re also best friends, which is nice, that we can kind of talk to each other about things.”
Olivia coaches at the RD Dance academy where all three sisters tried hip hop, commercial and freestyle forms of dancing.
“I wasn’t the best in comparison to my siblings, hence why it got the boot,” Tuthill continues. “But I enjoyed it.”
Tuthill had other interests she had to leave behind as her athletics career started to pick up speed. Two gorgeous ponies on her father’s farm, Holly and Polo, symbolise her love of horse riding. She still goes on hacks with her friends when she has time.
The cows and calves are nearby too in the various sheds around the farmyard. At peak times, some 200 cows pass through the milking parlour which is also on site. The Tuthill farm was featured on an episode of RTÉ’s Ear To The Ground in the aftermath of the Paris Olympics.
“It’s brilliant, but she’s still Nicola,” her proud father Norman said during the episode, with Nicola smiling beside him. Along with building the hammer cage for his daughter, he helps with the repair work too whenever a wire snaps or a handle breaks.
Not everyone can travel with Tuthill when she’s competing abroad but her Olympics debut in Paris was a major family occasion.
“It was really nice that a lot of my family were able to go, and a few of my friends were able to go out as well, which was really nice. When I came out after competing, they were all there.”
Turn 4
The wait to discover whether or not she had made the 2025 world final was torture. Tuthill sat in the stands beside her coach, Killian Barry, watching each effort intently.
After two bad throws, Tuthill launched herself into contention with a 70.7m beamer. That put her in sixth place with another group of throwers to follow. Only the top 12 could progress to the final.
“Did they pass me?”
“Did they not?”
Patience is a major requirement for hammer throw athletes. That particular day started at 6.30am for Tuthill with a warm-up before heading for the call room an hour later. Athletes do what they can to kill time.
“Some people will be chatting,” Tuthill adds. “Some people won’t talk. I’ll talk when someone talks to me.”
The wait between turns is lengthy too. But Tuthill and Barry make good use of that time to assess the throw she cannot change and reset for the next one. It’s how they navigated that nervy wait for the final which she did reach in Tokyo, and it’s how they responded from her first throw at the Paris Olympics.
“I caged my first throw and my last session beforehand, I was in tears. It was not a good day for me. And then I fouled my first throw into the net, and there’s only two more then. It’s the biggest stage.
“So, it was kind of prime position for me to panic but I think I know myself that all the work had been done and I was able to go back to Killian and he was like, ‘Well actually, it was just this tiny thing you did wrong and you know how to fix that. You’ll be fine.’”
Training follows a similar pattern. Barry is a native of Dublin and has moved to Cork. But even though he lives in Tuthill’s home county, he can’t always be around. He empowers her to run her own show.
“He’s very calm. If things are going wrong he’ll know not to panic, because if he panics I panic.
“He wants me to be able to see the corrections myself and, as an athlete, you need to have a good awareness of the technique yourself. If there’s sessions that he’s not there for, I need to be able to work on things, and know that this felt wrong. And I’ll take videos myself. I go to competitions sometimes by myself, so just that you know how to fix things.”
****
Tuthill is always looking for more. More progress. More championships. More PBs. More improvements in her technique. She finds joy in looking for new ways to finesse her form. At the moment, she’s focusing on the minutiae of the entry point in her routine.
“If you had nothing to improve, then where are you going?” she says.
That 73m national record is in her sights too, along with the European Championships which will be her headline event of 2026. She has college to balance with all that too, and is currently on teaching placement in Dublin.
Always chasing the high of a good turn. And all that comes with it.
“It doesn’t happen that often, where you’re genuinely excited. ‘Oh my God, I’ve thrown that.’ It’s not like you go out every week and PB. So, those kind of times when you do, it’s always special.”
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Hammer Throw Interview Nicola Tuthill Olympics