Taking it all in her stride
Lifestyle - Carrabane athlete Olive Loughnane represented Ireland at four Olympic Games and six consecutive World Championships. Olive, who holds the gold and the silver medal in the 2009 World Championship 20km racewalk, tells FRANCIS K BEIRNE why it is that she has two medals from the same event and about her accidental career in racewalking.
Being presented with a medal following a World Championships final is a rare and special moment for an athlete. Most of the Irish winners are familiar names – John Treacy, Eamonn Coghlan, Sonia O'Sullivan – but there’s one Irish athlete who has two World Championship medals, gold and a silver, and what makes this even more special is that they were awarded for the same race!
Olive Loughnane from Carrabane, between Athenry and Loughrea and a member of Loughrea Athletics Club, was ecstatic when she finished runner-up to Russian walker Olga Kaniskina at the World Championships in Berlin in August 2009. Climbing on to the podium to receive her silver medal is a memory that will stay with her forever. But, a few years later, the results changed and Olive was elevated to gold.
In 2015, Olga Kaniskina was disqualified for three years and two months, starting from October 15, 2012, because of illegal doping. In addition, all her results between July and September 2009 were annulled.
Kaniskina was part of a racewalking group trained by the notorious coach Viktor Chegin – more than a dozen members of the group were suspended for doping violations, while he was banned from all sports-related activities in 2016.
The upshot was that, in July 2016, Olive was retrospectively awarded the gold medal for the 2009 20km racewalk in Berlin.
On that August day, she had produced a season’s best time of 1:28:58 to chase home Kaniskina and also to see off the challenge of Chinese walker Liu Hong in the battle for silver.
It was a very special moment for the then-retired 40-year-old in 2016 as she was presented with the gold medal by IAAF president Sebastian Coe at that year’s European Championships in Amsterdam, before the Irish national anthem was played and the tricolour raised.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
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