Mountaineers to compete against each other during Olympics
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MORGANTOWN -- It will probably fly beneath the international radar in early August in Paris as the world’s best athletes gather for the 2024 Olympic Games but one of the best stories is the unlikely reunion that will take place between Ceili McCabe and Amy Cashin.
Ceili (pronounced KAY-lee) McCabe is a distance runner from Canada who last week qualified for the United States team in the 3,000-meter steeplechase. Cashin is from halfway around the world from McCabe but she, too, is a 3,000-meter steeplechase athlete hailing from Australia, who also qualified for the race.
That the two should somehow find their way into a friendship at West Virginia University is a story in itself, let alone that they will be competing against each other in what will be the high points of their careers up to this date.
It is hard to equate the odds on those two coming together like this, equally as hard to equate is the odds that WVU would provide the Olympic games with two world-class 3,000-meter steeplechasers.
Add to that the idea that Cashin, who preceded McCabe at WVU, her freshman year being 2016 while next year set up to be McCabe’s senior year, should she return, and the story gets more interesting, but their coach, Sean Cleary, who is becoming the maestro of world class steeplechase runners, related a little known story of how Cashin helped McCabe on her journey toward the top.
"Ceili’s freshman year she showed the same sort of aptitude and potential a few of our superstars did," Cleary admitted. "They were locked in and as freshmen were able to be awarded the Freshman of the Year in the Big 12"
But, over that winter, she struggled as she redshirted and then the world as we all knew it was shut down by Covid.
The pandemic threw the athletic world into a dither.
"Some kids lost their careers, other kids changed, others became better because of Covid and changed their games because the world had changed a little bit," Cleary said. "When I saw what Ceili did during Covid and not take her career for granted, that was the first moment I thought she could go as far as she wanted."
Cleary was fully on board with the thought he was developing another special athlete as a distance runner, something that was becoming a specialty.
McCabe had just come back from Eugene, Oregon, after her sophomore year, finishing sixth in the national Championships, a performance Cleary termed "quite incredible."
Back in Morgantown, the Olympics were coming up (it was 2021, the Tokyo Olympics pushed back a year due to Covid), and McCabe was not yet qualified to run.
"At the end of Year No. 2 for Ceili - and a lot of people don’t know this - we went out to Mylan Park and set up an official race. We had the proper officials, we filmed it, it was United States Track and Field certified," Cleary recalled.
"We were caught up in one of those heat waves like we had here two weeks ago," he continued. "We determined then we were not going to take a shot at the Olympic standard. To be totally honest, I didn’t think she could get it.
"She had run 9:37 in Eugene and the standard was 9:30. I didn’t think with the weather she could do that. After all, in Eugene she ran in front of 10,000 people on the coolest, perfect running night and she had run the race of her life.
"I felt that was as far as she could do. We had 50 people sitting in the stands -- teammates, parents, whoever was around."
Amy Cashin volunteered to pace her.
"Amy went five and a half laps of a seven and a half lap race and Ceili came flying down that straightaway at the end and missed the Olympic qualifying by 2.01 seconds. That was 2 seconds in a nine-minute race. I almost fell over. Having come so close, what I saw her do was out of this world."
That night Ceili McCabe was bitten by the Olympic bug.
"It’s been a three-year journey from that night to join Amy, who was just chosen for the Olympics, to line up in Paris," Cleary said. "It’s bittersweet. She came so close to going and that’s been on the tip of her tongue for three years."
Everyone knew there was room for growth. Ceili McCabe was still young, especially in a sport where you improve with age.
"She’s a baby in the sport," Cleary said on Sunday this week.
Cashin was a perfect example.
As a junior at WVU, Cashin had not broken 10 minutes in the steeplechase, a 10:01.9 run being the school record she set in finishing sixth in the NCAA East Prelims. She placed 19th in the NCAA championships in 10:11.86.
This year, in Australia, she qualified for the Australia Olympic team with a run of 9:39:53.
In that 2021 season when she paced McCabe at Mylan Park Cashin finished 24th in the Tokyo Olympic Games, having lowered her top time to 9:28.60 while qualifying for the team..
How has Cleary managed to crank out steeplechasers as he has over the years?
"For some reason in track, and for lack of a better word for it I’ll say lower conferences in the NCAA, you sometimes see women being thrown into the steeplechase out of desperation to try and contribute to the team scoring," Cleary said.
"I happen to look at it in the completely opposite way. We have taken our best athletes and run them in the steeplechase. Kids need to be able to jump. They need to be able to push off. They have the ability to push off a wooden barrier, put one foot in the water and not lose momentum with the other leg," he went on.
"It takes tremendous skill."
Cashin is from an athletic family, her brother, Liam, having won the gold medal at the 2022 Oceania Athletics Championships in the 3,000-meter steeplechase.
"We have Ceili right now who was a tremendous soccer player in high school. She made it to Notre Dame, it didn’t work out, but a school like Notre Dame offered her a soccer scholarship," Cleary said "She’s a tremendous athlete."
He then added that her favorite sport to play is baseball, where she is a catcher.
Her favorite sport is baseball. She was a catcher.
"She’s one of the very best runners I’ve ever coached in running in heat and humidity. I finally put it together in the last two weeks. Being a catcher you need to be used to being dirty and sweaty. I didn’t think about that until just a couple of weeks ago. I guarantee you that conditioned her to be able to run in conditions like that," Cleary said.
Perhaps he’s right about that, but it’s hard to imagine Yogi Berra going over the water jump in the steeplechase.