Sarah Leahy

Happy birthday to Ireland’s record-breaking sprinter Sarah Leahy, who is having the kind of season that rewrites a national record book.

Leahy holds the Irish indoor 50m record at 6.41, a mark that broke one which had stood for more than twenty years, and the Irish indoor 100m record at 11.72. Two individual national records in a single season is rare air. She is also part of the Irish 4x100m national record quartet at 43.73, and she ran the first leg — local reporting calls her a blistering starter, and 70,000 people in London watched her prove it. Her outdoor 100m best stands at 11.50, and she is a two-time Irish national indoor 60m champion, in 2023 and 2025.

Her route here is the best part. She was a Gaelic footballer first, with Killarney Legion and the University of Limerick, and for a couple of years football and her engineering degree simply won out over sprinting. Then she watched the World Relays on television, thought “I really want to do that,” and was back racing about eight weeks later. Five years on she was named in Ireland’s 4x100m squad for the World Relays in Gaborone herself. She does all of this while working full-time as a technician at Winthrop Technologies, coached by Daniel Kilgallon in Dublin, and Killarney thought enough of her to make her a grand marshal of this year’s St Patrick’s Day parade.

Happy birthday, Sarah — lá breithe sona duit! Wishing you health, happiness and a brilliant year ahead on the track and off it. Up the Kingdom! 🎂🎁🎉🫶🫶🇮🇪