PERHAPS THE LAST person left to be convinced of Rhasidat Adeleke’s stardom is Rhasidat Adeleke.
It’s October 2022, the start of the Fall training season and University of Texas coach Edrick Floréal hands out sheets of papers to all of his athletes and asks them to write down the time they want to run later in the NCAA season.
Adeleke is about to start training for the 400 metres, so she writes down her target for the event as something over 51 seconds and hands it back to Coach Flo.
Are you serious?
He bargains with her to lower the targeted time to 50.8.
Skip forward to 4 February this year. Adeleke goes to the New Mexico Collegiate Classic and runs the 400m indoors in 50.45. It’s the fastest Irish time in history, smashing a 21-year-old national record, and, to that point, the year’s best time anywhere in the world.
This new Irish record doesn’t last a month. Adeleke goes to the Big 12 Conference finals at the end of February and runs the same distance in 50.33 seconds. It’s the 14th-fastest time in the history of the event.
Coach Flo hands Adeleke a familiar sheet of paper and asks her to try lowering her targeted time again.
“I’ve always been way too realistic with performances”, Adeleke tells The42. ”I didn’t want to set myself up for disappointment so I set my goals a little low, but now I want to become more confident in my abilities. I have definitely tried to change my mindset that each performance has to be an improvement.”
Everyone else seems to be confident in Adeleke’s abilities, unsurprising given she holds six Irish national records and isn’t yet old enough to legally order a beer in Texas.
Adeleke’s reputation has long been heralded by the great and good of Irish athletics but the secret has long been out among people well away from that caucus: earlier this week she got a message online from an Irish person whom she didn’t know, telling her that they had booked tickets for the 400m final at the Paris Olympics next year. The subtext: we expect to see you there.
Coach Flo’s goal-setting sheets are just about the only realm in which Adeleke can maintain some control the levels of expectation.
“At the end of the day, pressure is people expecting great things from you”, she says. “I’d rather people expect things from me and think I have this potential than people not believe in me at all. At the end of the day, pressure is only what you make of it.”
To now, Adeleke has made the most of the support she has received, most obviously at last year’s 400m European final, in which she finished fifth.
“What motivates me to want to do it for myself is being able to make other people proud”, she says. “It’s all connected. For example at the Europeans: although I wasn’t satisfied with my own performance as I wanted to medal, I was so happy to be able to perform to the level where the supporters were satisfied. Seeing the response to my performance enlightened me: it took away from the disappointment that I didn’t medal. Seeing how proud other people were of me wants me to keep on doing it.”
Adeleke played a host of different sports growing up but running for Ireland at the Youth Olympics when she was 14 was the moment she picked athletics.
“I thought, ‘This is real.’ This is what people dream of, representing your country at international level. I feel I’ve done it so often you can sometimes forget just how significant an achievement it is. It’s always something I’ve looked forward to since I was young. To do it so consistently, I am so grateful for it. And to see other Irish people compete so well, sometimes you might see an Irish person in a race and sometimes count them out, but now we are really making a name for ourselves. From sprinters to distance runners to throwers, we are becoming a force to be reckoned with.”
Paris 2024 flits across her thoughts every now and again, but how could it not? The Olympics is always out there on everybody’s horizon, just begging to be looked at. Only last week Adeleke read an article reporting the track’s dominant colour will be purple, her favourite colour. “That might be a sign!”, she laughs.
Paris is a prime target but it’s not an immediate goal. Adeleke’s biggest target for this year is to represent Ireland at the World Athletics Championships in Budapest in August, and likely at the European U23s in Finland a month earlier. She isn’t with the Irish team at the European Indoor Championships in Turkey this weekend as she is committed to the University of Texas, preparing for the NCAA Championships in Albuquerque next weekend.
Adeleke’s times in the last few weeks have assuaged many of the initial fears that choosing the ultra-competitive, team-results-oriented American college circuit may not be the best decision for her development. That’s no accident: she addressed any potential problems before they could arise.
“One of the reasons I chose University of Texas is because I knew I’d be in safe hands. I spoke to the coaches and the staff, the trainers, the physios, everyone. It’s important to go to a university that won’t run you into the ground, and cares about their athletes. I’ve noticed at some of the schools my friends have gone to, their coach will put them into multiple events at Championships to score points for the team.
“I spoke to Flo about things like that. I used to look at the results from previous competitions of which Flo was the head coach and see how many of his athletes were entered in events, and I noticed Coach Flo would never run his athletes into the ground. He always cared for them and had their best interests in mind.”
I ask Adeleke whether she has set a new time on her coach’s goal sheet.
“I did change it”, she smiles”, but I might leave it for people to see when I hopefully achieve it.”
Rhasidat Adeleke was speaking as the newest sporting ambassador of Allianz Insurance, as the brand commits to supporting the 20-year old’s bid to compete at the Olympic Games in Paris 2024
