Kate Kirby, the Sport Ireland psychologist I worked with, came out in early May and she stayed in St Moritz, where Helen [Clitheroe] was also based. One day, they travelled down together to the regular loop we used in Celerina. As soon as I saw Helen’s face, I knew something was off.She instructed me to go and do a warm-up. She usually joined me on the bike but didn’t seem to be coming and Kate suggested that I warm up with Tommy [Moran, Ciara’s partner, who provided support during her training and race preparation]. Helen actually had her back to me, staring out at the mountains.After that session, Kate told me that Helen had decided that she didn’t want to coach me any more. She’d said she didn’t coach to just write a programme, that she needed more from coaching, and that I wasn’t engaging enough with her.I was surprised that Helen seemed to be upset with how I was finding my feet since leaving the team, and with the new supports I had placed around myself. [Ciara had decided to depart from the Team New Balance Manchester setup, but still remained a New Balance sponsored athlete.]Ciara Mageean interview: ‘I probably won’t make my 40th birthday’Ciara Mageean. Photograph: Evanna Devine for The Irish Times (Evanna Devine/Evanna Devine) We’re sitting in Mageean’s livingroom in Dunmurry, a quiet suburb just south of Belfast. This is the house she and her fiance Thomas Moran moved to when she came home heartbroken after the 2024 Olympics. That was the plan. Before.Before cancer. Before stage four. Before chemotherapy. Before immunotherapy. Before the sickness and the tiredness and the lakes of tears. Before ever giving a second’s thought to death or survival, fear or hope. I recognised that she must have felt hurt that I wasn’t relying on her as much, but I was trying to establish what would work best for me while training for the Europeans, which were fast approaching.Kate noted that our communication had clearly disintegrated.She told us both to write down what we wanted from the arrangement and organised a meeting in her accommodation.At that meeting, I said what I needed from the relationship and so did Helen. Yes, I had some minor issues with her coaching, particularly that she never gave me the kind of soft feedback at training that I was used to and thrived on from Steve and Jerry [former coaches Steve Vernon and Jerry Kiernan].When I’m struggling physically to hit my splits, I need someone on the sideline guiding me through my mental barriers by breaking it down into smaller, more achievable blocks, and that just wasn’t Helen’s style. There was also the fact that the intricacies of race-day planning and knowing what my opponents might do – something that Steve had been great at – didn’t seem to be one of her strengths. It was Tommy’s though, so I felt I still had that covered.Ireland’s Ciara Mageean celebrates with her gold medal after winning the 1,500m at the 2024 European Athletics Championships in Rome. Photograph: Morgan Treacy/Inpho Once again, I pleaded with her to keep coaching me. We also had another back and forth about Tommy’s role where I again emphasised that he was a brilliant asset but wasn’t my coach.In hindsight I should have let Helen walk away at this point, and I’ll forever wish that I had left her sooner.The day before this session, I had received a message from Ricky [Simms, Ciara’s race agent], saying, “I hear things aren’t good between you and Helen” and offering his support. This came as a shock as I’d never raised the issue with him.When I called him the next day, he mentioned that Pete Riley had been in touch with him to say: “If Ciara isn’t nicer to Helen, she is going to walk.”Like everyone else in the world, I can be a bitch if I really want. I genuinely didn’t think that I was in this case. I even remember showing Kate all of my messages with Helen, detailing how I felt each day and how the training went. I was just being a bit more focused and emotionally detached, which Helen had advised.I’ll put my hands up. I had been very rude to her once, a month previous. Jip [training partner and best friend, Jip Vastenburg] had gone and Tommy hadn’t yet arrived, so I asked Helen if she could – as Jip did – pace me by cycling directly in front of me, rather than simply matching the pace I set, beside me. Helen felt she couldn’t do that and also said the bike didn’t have good enough brakes.I asked, “Would you please try because I’m really struggling here?”She snapped that I was concentrating on the wrong thing and should just do the reps.I snapped back: “Fine! Just go stand at the finish line then and call the splits.”I didn’t swear or anything, but I shouldn’t have snapped.During our meeting with Kate, Helen said that I had made her cry that day, so I apologised. I genuinely meant it, but it’s fair to say that, by this point, our relationship was rapidly fragmenting.Ciara Mageean with her partner Tommy and her dog Sammy at the Mary Peters Track Photograph: Evanna Devine for The Irish Times A breaking point came on May 14th when we met for a coffee and further insult was directed at Tommy. That made me very angry and I was happy when she flew back to Manchester soon afterwards.I felt that all of her own insecurities were being directed towards me and Tommy, and that he in particular was an easy scapegoat because he was an outsider and not connected to her role with New Balance.I was so emotionally upset in the aftermath that I struggled to finish sessions. I’d been training well before all the bullshit erupted. Now I couldn’t hit 100m in 17 seconds. I was mentally exhausted, at the lowest ebb that I had ever been, and I couldn’t perform physically because of it.My emotional state plays a huge role in what I can do physically and I believe my body just shut down at that point due to this stress.I can safely say that the only reason I was so successful at the 2024 European Championships was thanks to Tommy, who slowly teased the running back out of me. He didn’t take anything Helen said too personally and just tried, as he always has, to help me in any way that he could.He brought me to the track, took the watch off my arm and said, “We’re just going to do some sessions and you’re just going to stay on me.”When he started those reps, I couldn’t get anywhere near him, not even a slow 200m. We did short runs, we did gentle strides and eventually he was telling me, “you’re doing a 16-second stride,” “that’s a 15-second stride.” He revived me physically and mentally, reassuring me as to how well I’d been running at the start of that camp and that my body had retained that hard work.Ciara Mageean made a dash for the Irish fans at Stadio Olimpico in Rome following her victory in the 1,500m final at the 2024 European Athletics Championships. Photograph: Morgan Treacy/Inpho My season opener came in the SportCity in Manchester on May 25th. I still felt so far off my best, but the European Champs were starting on June 7th and I urgently needed to race. I went in blind, dreading the worst, yet ran my fastest 800m ever, breaking 1:59 for the first time with a new Irish record of 1:58.51. I still wonder how much faster I could have gone if I had actually been confident that day.Helen was technically still my coach. She approached Tommy at that event, wondering if she should go down to me at the track, which he found perplexing. After months of taking issue with his contributions, now here she was asking his advice? He told her the same thing I had often done: that she needed to be more confident and less tentative.She said “well done” to me afterwards and there was some small talk.I didn’t hang around anyway because I was racing 1,500m in Ostrava three days later, which I won in 4:01.98 ahead of Sarah Healy.I was so mentally fried that I trailed at the back for most of it. I thought I was blowing out my arse but when it came to it, I actually had a kick. With about 200m left, I managed to catch myself on and stormed home. I’m sure everyone watching was wondering what the hell I was doing that day, but the performance reflected where my head was at. I really wasn’t in a good place mentally.I was due to race in Stockholm on June 2nd but pulled out, feeling that I needed to rebuild my self-belief and mental resilience before Europeans.I was a medal favourite after winning silver in 2022 and, with Laura Muir skipping them to concentrate on the Olympics, this was my golden opportunity to win a European title.Ireland actually stayed in the same hotel as Team GB, so my great friend Izzy [Fry] was also there and we were able to chill together, like old times. She was making her European track debut in Rome and I was delighted when she ran a personal best and finished 10th in the 5,000m on the same day as the 1,500m heats.Ciara Mageean: 'I was a medal favourite after winning silver in 2022 and, with Laura Muir skipping the European Championships to concentrate on the Olympics, this was my golden opportunity to win a European title.' Photograph: Evanna Devine for The Irish Times Helen was officially still my accredited coach, but Athletics Ireland went out of their way to get me an additional coach accreditation for Tommy, which was highly unusual. I didn’t want to take the coach role away from Helen, because I was the one who had asked her to continue coaching me. She came to the warm-up track before both races and it was all amicable, but Tommy did the warm-up with me. As usual, I got all the info I needed on my opponents from him, wrote out my detailed race-day timetable and race scenarios and WhatsApped them to Helen.Even though I was among the favourites, the previous few months had taken such a toll on me, physically and mentally, that I genuinely feared it could all fall apart.I was always up in the first three or four in that tightly bunched European final where I felt Britain’s Gemma Reekie would be my biggest threat. With 230m to go, I took the inside line. That was a mistake. The French athlete came up on my right-hand side and I got boxed in, full of running but with nowhere to go. It was like being a horse in the starting stalls, caged in and wanting to explode.As we rounded the bend, I genuinely panicked. There was a wall of Brits in front of me. I remember thinking, “Should I check now and go wide or could a gap appear?” Then: “I’ll test their mettle with a surge.”No dice! They were holding firm. Or were they?Like some divine intervention, their shoulders parted and it was now or never. My sights were on the finish line. “C’mon Ciara! Drive! Drive! Drive!”A quick glance at the screen confirmed that I was home clear. As I crossed the line I threw both my arms up in elation.'A quick glance at the screen confirmed that I was home clear': A lifetime of hard work pays off for Ciara Mageean at Stadio Olimpico in the 1,500m final of the 2024 European Athletics Championships. Photograph: Morgan Treacy/Inpho At moments like that, all the lactic acid and distress seems to leave your body and it feels like you’re running on clouds.“I didn’t grow up playing camogie to get boxed in there today,” I told David Gillick afterwards on RTÉ where I also mentioned that I’d “had a bit of a rocky month beforehand.”I was a bit worried that Team GB might put in an appeal because of the way I’d come through their girls. Appeals can be submitted for interference or obstruction and usually go in immediately afterwards, so when Irish team manager Teresa McDaid collected me from the mixed zone, I asked her if she’d heard any whiff of one. She hadn’t.I did ‘check’ my speed momentarily before I accelerated through the gap, which came about because Reekie’s legs started to go. She was gassed at that point and finished fifth, so no appeal transpired.Most of my family weren’t there because they’d spent all their money on the upcoming Olympics. The medal ceremony didn’t take place until the next day and was actually a bit weird. Not only was it outside the stadium, but there was no flagpole or flag. Instead, we were told to look sideways, off-stage, while they projected these images onto a screen behind the podium, well wide of our sightline.Still, ‘Amhrán na bhFiann’ was played. There was also a huge crowd of Irish fans, who had brought plenty of Tricolours for me to admire.Finally, I was a European champion.Nobody apart from those closest to me knew how f**king hard the past few years had been.A devastating way to bow outI left Paris on August 10th, the day before the 1,500m final, which I didn’t watch then or since.Prior to leaving, I was over and back to the athletes’ village to pick up my medical reports and thank the Team Ireland staff. On one visit, I bumped into Rhys McClenaghan, who’s from a half hour away from me in county Down. He had just become the new Olympic pommel horse champion, Ireland’s first medallist ever in gymnastics. “I don’t know what to say to you; I’m so sorry,” Rhys said. I brushed it off. I felt like this big gloomy cloud and didn’t want to be raining on anyone else’s joy. Anyway, I was genuinely delighted for him and told him so.I also bumped into Kellie Harrington, Ireland’s boxing queen, who had just won her second Olympic gold. Kellie’s just a gem. I’ve so much respect for her as an athlete but also for her kind nature.(From left) Kellie Harrington, Sonia O’Sullivan and Ciara Mageean at the 2024 Irish Times Sportswoman of the Year Awards. Photograph: Tom Maher/Inpho She was like: “Ah, Ciara, f**k! I don’t know what to say!”We just hugged it out.“It’s sport, Kellie, you know yourself. It is what it is.”“Look, we’re just heading off to Penneys, d’ya wanna come with us?” she asked, which was just pure Kellie.“Nah, I’m good,” I laughed and headed off.The way it was all handled was testament to how well the Olympic Federation of Ireland, Athletics Ireland and my Irish agent, Sinéad Galvin, worked together. Somehow they managed to keep me under the radar. I didn’t have to do any live media. They all said, “We’ve got this, Ciara, don’t you worry about anything.” I was extremely grateful for that.But I had been doing little video diaries for Flogas, who were also a Team Ireland sponsor, and agreed to do one last one, which gave me the chance to speak directly to all the fans and supporters.I was being interviewed for it at this typical Parisian café when suddenly there was a big frog in my throat and I really struggled to hold it together. It was like a terrible, raw grief that I hadn’t yet processed suddenly hit me. I wish I could call myself a three-time Olympian. I got the accreditation and the competition kit and made it as far as the village in Paris, yet I never toed the start-line. That was devastating and, given everything that has happened to my health since, bowing out of the sport like that now seems particularly tragic.Ciara Mageean's new book, My Greatest Race I’ve still competed twice in the Olympics and only a tiny percentage of people on planet Earth ever make it that far. I’m also an individual European outdoor track champion, something only one other Irish athlete – Sonia O’Sullivan – has achieved.I won that European gold on my last big race so I console myself now with the belief that that was a far better end to my career than standing in tears and pain at the side of an Olympic track.♦ My Greatest Race by Ciara Mageean is published by Gill Books and is available from 18th June in all good bookshops.