Nenagh Olympic’s Frawley receives National Athletics gong

By Thomas Conway

It has been a dizzyingly successful year for Nenagh Olympic athlete Laura Frawley, and yet she seems cool and level-headed, as if nothing could faze her.

The 21 year-old combined events specialist has that psychological steeliness that you’ll find is common amongst heptathletes and decathletes. They don’t have time to dwell on past successes or failures. Too much thinking can be fatal. As Frawley says herself, “you just have to keep moving.”

The Mary Immaculate College Limerick student capped off a stunning individual season by landing the University Athlete of the Year Award at last Thursday’s 123.ie National Athletics Awards at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Dublin.

A native of Co. Limerick, Frawley was crowned National Senior Combined Events champion in Tullamore last July for her performances in the Heptathlon. She also cruised to gold in the National Indoor Combined Events Championships in Santry back in January, dominating the Pentathlon. Her performances over the course of the season mark her out as an emerging national talent, but of course, she isn’t the only heptathlete in the country to have excelled in 2025.

Kate O’Connor’s exploits, which culminated in a historic silver medal at the World Championships in Tokyo, elevated the Dundalk woman to new heights and made her a household name amongst the public. Fittingly, she was chosen as the Irish Athletics Athlete of the Year at that same ceremony.

Former hurdler and RTÉ pundit Derval O’Rourke was inducted into the Hall of Fame while Cian McPhillips, who claimed bronze in the 800 metres in Tokyo in September, was named Track Athlete of the Year. Frawley says that being in the presence of those giants of Irish athletics, new and old, was an honour and a privilege.

“A lot of the athletes that I would have looked up to - especially Kate O’Connor for example - were literally sitting at the table beside me. And to think that I was up there with them, that I was recognised along with them, was actually quite special,” she admitted.

Frawley is on the verge of beginning her career as a primary school teacher - all going well she will graduate at the end of this academic year. Her athletics career, however, is already blossoming. She attributes her success last season to steady, incremental improvements. Her objective for each competition was to “build on her results from the previous competition”.

Instead of chasing medals, she chased progression. There was another factor. Towards the end of last year, she incorporated more strength & conditioning work into her training program. She was new to the gym, so an adjustment process was necessary, but it appears to have paid dividends. She’s currently in the middle of an intense winter training block and feels confident that the heavy gym work she’s doing now will translate into better performances throughout the course of next season.

Frawley says she has lots of role models in athletics, but predictably enough, Kate O’Connor is the person she really idolises. But it’s less because of the success and more due to O’Connor’s relentless work ethic, she emphasises.

“Kate, in particular, is someone I look up to,” she added.

“Because obviously she’s doing the same event that I do, but the training and the amount of work that she puts in is just crazy. She’s a real inspiration for me.”

The heptathlon, which combines seven events over two days and is as physically gruelling as it mentally demanding, was first introduced to the Olympic Games in LA84, replacing the five-event pentathlon. Frawley believes that she is well suited to it but admits that it is not for the faint-hearted. Disaster can strike at any moment, she says, and you have to be able to bounce back from that.

“In a multi-disciplined sport like the heptathlon, not every competition, not every event, is going to go to plan. If I had to focus on just one event, there’s always a danger that it could go wrong, and then it’s your everything. Whereas when you have the multi-events and you have four or five events in a day, you kind of have to just keep rolling along. You don’t have a choice. You just have to keep moving,” Laura concluded.