Gavin Cooney

Editor’s note: This piece was written by Gavin Cooney in Paris and originally published on The 42 whose award-winning team produces original content that you won’t find anywhere else: on GAA, League of Ireland, women’s sport and boxing, as well as our game-changing rugby coverage, all with an Irish eye. Subscribe here.

PERHAPS EDRICK FLORÉAL wore a white t-shirt to accentuate his point. 

It wasn’t long after the final of the women’s 400m at the world championships when Rhasidat Adeleke cried into his lap, smearing his polo shirt with her make-up and tears. Adeleke had just finished fourth in the world: a stunning achievement in the context of Irish sport but crushing when viewed through the paradigm of her own ambition.

Fourth just means you’re the last person sent home without a medal. 

Floréal’s Jackson Pollocked-polo shirt, though, would be a more emphatic lesson than anything he had told Adeleke since they had started working together at the University of Texas. “The first thing I told her,” Floréal recalled in an interview with The 42 conducted earlier this summer, “is now I bet you’ll listen.” 

Up to then, he had been trying to convince Adeleke to add to her daily life the dreary realities of life as an elite professional. 

“She didn’t take care of her core,” says Floréal. “She has one exercise she’s supposed to do every day and she hadn’t been doing them. So her back sort of fell apart right after NCAA.

“Her back just was unstable. She was unable to maintain and in the end of the race she just fell apart. Sometimes, lessons have to be lived and the more you live them, the more you learn them. Having an old man tell you what to do is pointless. But fourth place? That’s real.” 

The lesson quickly seeped in.

Floréal describes the necessary stuff of elite professionalism as like watching paint dry, but Adeleke is now taking it all in. Glute activations. Band exercises after gym sessions. Planking. Muscle activations that inch from her lower back to her calves. Grab, hold, pause. Grab, hold, pause. Grab, hold, pause. Over and over and over again. 

What nobody tells you about professional sport is how boring it is. 

Do ten sets of 200m sprints and you might vomit at the end of it but you can also get a instant sense of your progress. But glute activations and core exercises? These are long-term investments whose yield takes a long time. 

Adeleke’s professional deal with Nike has helped on this front, too. They assigned her a physical therapist, Justin Whitaker, whom Floréal describes as the “captain of the ship”. He has designed specific physical routines for Adeleke and handed them to Floréal, and anyone Adeleke sees – be it a chiropractor, physio, or even massage therapist – must first run it by him and then report back after. Everyone is aligned so as Adeleke is in optimum shape to find the tenths of a second that isolate glory. 

Now Adeleke is beginning to see the returns. All of her lifts in the gym are now 15% heavier than when she started with Floréal, and with her core much stronger, Adeleke is better-equipped to fend whatever monster challenge she’ll face down the home straight later today. 

“She hasn’t skipped on anything,” says Floréal. “She’s done every rep, every set. She’s done all of it and it shows us the way she’s sprinting. She’s a lot more stable: there’s not that big arch in her back.” 

Alamy Stock Photo Alamy Stock Photo

So today will be the proof as to whether another Coach Flo masterplan can come together. He represented Canada in the triple jump at the 1988 and 1992 Olympics, and is now a coach held in high regard. 

He has coached St Lucia’s Julien Alfred to gold in the women’s 100m and silver in the 200m at these Olympics, and now he aims to deliver another medal in the 400m.

A few years ago, Floréal was watching recorded footage of the European Youth Championships, scouting an athlete whom he was trying to recruit for the University of Texas. While fast-forwarding through the footage he happened to pause during the 200m event, and it was at that point he watched a long-limbed girl from Ireland scorch the field. He turned to his assistant and laughed. 

“Holy smoke. Whoever that is, we need her.”

He was taken aback by Adeleke’s pace, of course, but mostly the length of her stride. Here was a sprinter who might just have something of the outlier Usain Bolt: someone who moved as a sprinter who’s tall rather than a tall person trying to sprint. 

“Bolt is an exception. A guy that tall being that athletic and kinetically aware, there’s complete control of the stride frequency. Basically, she was moving like a short person but probably eight inches of more height than the typical woman. I thought, ‘Jeez, if she can do that, we can make her stronger.’ Very rarely do you have a six-foot tall girl who can sprint, they will be distance runners. They don’t have that zip to move that quickly and that effortlessly.”

Floréal did his research, discovered her name was Rhasidat Adeleke, and sent her a DM on Instagram. Adeleke took up a scholarship at the University of Texas in the autumn of 2021. 

Then began Floréal’s first efforts at persuasion: to run the 400 metres. Adeleke was phenomenal at 100m and 200m in Ireland and in the junior ranks in Europe, but Floréal felt her leg length and natural endurance gave her a crucial edge in the 400m. He felt they could train the 100m or 200m and be competitive, but perhaps never get to the rarified air of an Olympic final. But if she could take her sprint advantage to the 400m? That’s the world in which medals become realistic. 

One problem. The 400m is hell. 

“No idiot wants to say, ‘Yeah, I’d like to run the event that’s gonna probably cause me to vomit every day and be in pain every workout,” says Floréal.

“No athlete in their right mind wants to volunteer for this stuff. It’s about pain and who can hurt the most for the longest.” 

But Floréal helped to convince Adeleke to do it. His latest persuasion act is in how to run it. Adeleke has run four individual events since winning silver at the European Championships, and only one of those was the 400m.

Otherwise she has run 100m and 200m to build up her speed for the first half of the 400m in Paris. He wants Adeleke to use her speed advantage to get out of the blocks fast, and then have a lead to defend down the back straight. 

Floréal’s rationale is the faster she can routinely do the first half of the race, the more energy she will have for the latter half. 

“Michael Johnson posted something a little bit ago,” he says. “As he got faster, he began to attack the 1st 200 of the 400 and as he began to attack it, his time dropped consistently. Most of your novice quarter-milers, they go out slow and want to save time for the finish.

“Making her more comfortable at a faster speed will allow her to have more energy left at the end. 

“She’s still thinking, ‘If I go out in 22, I’m gonna die.’ I say, ‘No, and, you know, a Ferrari going at 30 miles an hour doesn’t even look good.’ 

“It’s just getting her to just understand that she will not spend that much energy based on her body structure and based on her full speed.” 

Adeleke made history by finishing second in her semi-final, becoming the first Irish sprinter ever to make a flat Olympic final. But though she crossed a rubicon for Irish sport, she didn’t do it as quickly as planned. “It was a messy race,” said Adeleke, “but I’m just excited that I’m able to get into the final and fix everything.” 

Floréal is in Paris and is accredited through the Irish team, so is in position to begin those repairs. Based on the semi-finals, Marileidy Paulino and  Salwa Eid Naser look to be out of reach, but the bronze medal is still attainable. 

Poland’s Natalia Kaczmarek is the favourite for third place, having pipped Adeleke to European gold in June. But Adeleke was not truly targeting that gold medal, as Floréal did not taper training.  

Because everything has led to tonight in Paris.