Some plans are best torn up.
“It’s funny because I had told people that I was going to retire after 2024 if I went to the Olympics or if I didn’t, but obviously that has changed,” Mawdsley says. “If I can have running as my full-time job until [LA] 2028, I’ll be pretty pleased.”
The Tipperary woman had a breakthrough season both as an individual and as a relay anchor-leg runner. There was bronze in the mixed 4x400m relay at the World Relays in the Bahamas in May.
Gold and silver in the mixed and women’s relay at the European Championships in Rome where she was also a 400m finalist. She got the qualifying standard for the 400m for Paris where she ran a lifetime best of 50.71 to finish fourth in her heat and she just missed out on qualifying for the semi-final.
But that wasn’t the huge heart-breaking story of fourth place in Paris. That came the day of her 26th birthday in the final of the 4x400m relay. Mawdsley ran the anchor leg, recorded her fastest ever split of 49.14, but got pipped to the bronze medal by 0.18 of a second.
No, she hasn’t watched the race back in full. She saw a clip of herself being overtaken in the back straight by Britain’s Amber Anning and that was enough.
“It’s still a little bit raw because we were so close but there is no medal for fourth place. So no matter how close it was, we still didn’t walk away with a medal. When I saw that we would have won a medal in any other Olympics other than 1988, I kind of made peace with that. We had run out of our skins. I guess it still is fourth in the Olympics but we are still without that medal.”
Ideally, Mawdsley would have wrapped her season them but she’s a professional athlete now so she had another race to run in early September in Switzerland. But it turned out that one put a pin in a pressure she’d been holding all season.
This season Susanne Gogl-Walli has been a rival like no other for Mawdsley. This was the Austrian athlete she was adjudged to have obstructed after she overtook her in the semi-final of the World Indoors in March, and she was later controversially disqualified from competing in her first global individual final. Mawdsley raced against Gogl-Walli three times after indoors and lost all three times including in the Olympic heat when the Austrian finished ahead of her by 0.04 of a second.
Sharlene Mawdsley after the women’s 4×400 relay final at the Stade de France during the Olympic Games in Paris. Photo: Sam Barnes/Sportsfile
But finally in her last race of the season, Mawdsley beat Gogl-Walli – as well as Lieke Klaver – to win the Gala dei Castelli meeting in the Swiss town of Bellinzona.
“It had come to a stage where I was kind of sensitive after World Indoors. When Susanne beat me in the Olympics, she got to go to the semi-final and I didn’t. I was like, I just have to make peace because she was living in my head rent-free at this stage. I think mentally it just took a huge weight off my shoulders because I felt at one point that I was racing one girl all the time. I needed that out of my head.
“I even came home [after the win] and my mam had got me a cake and it said: you did it! So it was kind of big for anyone who knows me, they just knew how much it meant for me to be able to do it.”
Mawdsley’s personal best in Paris got her the qualifying standard for next year’s World Championships in Tokyo. She is set to make changes for next year although she doesn’t confirm what those could be until she talks to her coaches after her down-time ends.
“I want to try new things for next year so at least I’ll have that ball to play with. It might work out, it might not I don’t know, but at least there’s options there that I can try new things and we’ll see what happens.
“I always said I wouldn’t live off the Olympics until my career is over. I had World Indoors where I got disqualified. It would have been so easy to let that ruin my whole season. I think I’ve just got so good at coming back. I think I’ve had so many bad moments that I’ve been able to fight back really well so I think that’s something I’m really good at.”
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