Mary Purcell gained recognition as the leading authority in women’s sports in Ireland by the early 1970s, after making a habit of breaking down barriers and standing firm in her convictions. Led by Purcell, women’s sports in Ireland saw monumental progress, from the 800m race, all the way up to cross-country marathons. Over her trailblazing 12-year career, she took part in two Olympics, specifically Munich 1972 and Montreal 1976.
In both the Olympics, she competed in 800m and 1,500m races, becoming the first Irish woman to participate in the 1,500m. The 1,500m race was open to women from 1972 and, until 1984, was the lengthiest event for women at the Olympics.
Even when it was not yet fully accepted for women to participate in distance running, nothing deterred Purcell. While juggling between her occupation as a pharmacist and raising a young family, she relentlessly pursued her athletic passion.
Remarkably, Purcell took part in two European Athletics Championships and five World Cross Country championships. She won a total of 13 Irish titles, including nine on the track, three cross-country, and one on the road. She also won three British titles and broke 12 Irish records. Between 1972 and 1976, she was undefeated in Ireland.
Purcell was an athlete of firsts for Ireland; she was the first to try altitude training and was determined to compete against male athletes to improve herself. In addition, she was the only Irish athlete who joined the US-led boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics, a bold decision guided by her unwavering ethical principles after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
However, despite her perseverance, Purcell could only win a single major championship medal, the 1,500m European indoor bronze in 1980. This was due to her career largely overlapping with the era of state-sponsored doping in the Eastern bloc. All said and done, Mary was an incredibly persistent and inspiring athlete who brought life to the sport.
Purcell, a renowned Irish athlete, gradually lost faith in the Olympics. Consequently, she decided not to participate in Moscow, making her the only Irish sportsperson who didn’t request approval from the Irish Olympic corporation, even though she had met the required qualifications. She revealed in a 2018 interview with this newspaper that her decision was inspired by her understanding of the prevailing doping situation, thanks to her background as a pharmacist. The increased drug usage in the competitions had started to appear more apparent.
She was reminded of an incident where she walked behind certain Soviet sprinters, observing changes in their physiology due to the use of particular substances – the masculinisation of women and feminisation of men, a deeper voice and a lengthened face were a few signs that made her suspect.
Born in 1949, Dublin was where Purcell came into the world. She participated in her first Olympic Games at the age of 23 in Munich in 1972. She managed to better her Irish record for the 1,500m, posting a time of 4:16.43, but she only came sixth in her heat, failing to advance further. The same event was also scarred by the horrifying massacre of 11 Israeli members by the radical group known as Black September, who had abducted them from within the Olympic village.
Four years onwards, she once again set the Irish record at the Montreal Olympics with a new personal best of 4:08.63 in the 1,500m race. However, she only secured fifth place in her heat and couldn’t progress further due to the Soviet and East German competitors’ dominant performance.
Following the birth of her first child, Kara, in 1977, Purcell missed majority of that year’s season. When it came to missing out on the Moscow Olympics, there were no regrets, especially considering the flawless performance the Soviet women were putting on. Tatyana Kazankina retained her 1,500m title with a groundbreaking Olympic record of 3:56.56, with Christine Wartenberg from East Germany getting the second place and Nadiya Olizarenko, another Soviet, clinching the third.
At the beginning of the Moscow Olympics, an additional 66 countries had followed in the steps of the United States in boycotting the event, resulting in only 80 nations taking part. The host nation, the Soviet Union, dominated the podium, clinching a record 80 gold, 69 silver, and 46 bronze medals. In close succession, East Germany secured 47 gold, 37 silver and 42 bronze medals. Bulgaria was next best nationally, securing eight gold, 16 silver and 17 bronze medals. Despite doping suspicions regarding East German and Soviet competitors, there were no recorded positive tests during the event.
Mary Purcell, who originally went by Mary Tracey, confronted her athletic potential at 21 despite her commitment to hockey and a foundation in athletics. At that time, she was enrolled in a pharmacy programme at UCD and her family was managing a well-known pharmacy in Dublin’s Eden Quay.
Her interest in athletics was initially kindled by the 1968 Mexico Olympics, but it wasn’t until a fortuitous opportunity that she began to see it as a feasible path. Purcell recalls how she watched the ’68 Olympics on television, thinking she’d missed her chance as she was going to college to study pharmacy. A poor hockey match led to team cuts, among whom she was one. This setback proved fortuitous when she met Peter Purcell who suggested she try athletics. Peter became not only her coach, but also later, her husband.
Purcell quickly joined the ranks of the old Guinness Athletics Club. In her debut track season in 1972, she established herself as a promising talent by clocking 2:04.2 for the 800m event, securing a ticket to the Munich Olympics.
Purcell had always held a dislike for being dictated on her freedom to race, even from her initial days of track competition. A stand-out event took place in 1978 at the UCD track in Belfield, where she participated alongside men in a 5,000m race, to the shock of race officials. She withdrew after achieving a 3,000m time of 8:51.4, the quickest by any Irish female competitor over such a distance at the time.
She never dwelled on her achievements, often stating: “People may say ‘You’re amazing for accomplishing this’, but the ordinary tasks of life still demand attention. You have your daily work, the needs of the home…I was never content, always striving for improvement, to be a better version of myself.”
Another characteristic that distinguished Purcell was her adventurous spirit, willing to push her limits. This led her to do unconventional things, like training at high altitudes in St Moritz when it was still a unique approach, and running astounding distances of around 130 miles weekly, including 30-mile stretches across the Dublin Mountains.
To those who knew her, her resolve to not participate in the Moscow Games due to personal beliefs was expected. Lindie Naughton, who used to train with Purcell and now a respected author and sports journalist, describes her as extremely obstinate, yet delightful. She narrates an instance, “I was a witness to one of her 5,000m men’s races where she ran 3,000m. The officials from the Dublin board were in absolute frenzy!”
Post the Moscow games, Purcell became a mother for the second time, welcoming her daughter Jan. Simultaneously managing her own pharmacy business, she briefly ventured into marathon racing, eventually winning the Irish title in 1982 and the fourth Dublin Marathon in 1983. She then bow out from competitive racing.
Purcell, now 75, has made Douglas on the Isle of Man her residence since 1993. There, she established SEQ, a regulatory affairs consultancy for the pharmacy sector.
While numerous Irish female athletes have posted faster times and achieved more laurels, Purcell undeniably assisted them in paving the way. Uniquely, she remains the single Irish sportswoman to firmly defend her convictions in relation to the Olympic Games.
A complex history shadows female participation at the Olympics. The founder of the modern Olympic Games in 1896, Charles Pierre de Frédy, better known as Baron de Coubertin, intentionally made it exclusive for men, stating that a Olympiad involving women would be “impractical, uninteresting, un-aesthetic and improper.”
However, progress was gradual. The subsequent games in 1900, held in Coubertin’s home city Paris, saw some concessions being made and 22 women were permitted to participate across five sports – tennis, golf, sailing, croquet and equestrian – alongside 1,096 men. This constituted just under two percent of the total athletes, and Britain’s Charlotte Cooper made history as the first female Olympic gold medal winner.
Fast forward to the present day, 124 years later, and the forthcoming Paris Games will witness a 50-50 gender split among athletes for the first time in the history of the Olympics. Nearly half of the approximately 10,500 athletes will be women, with 20 mixed-gender medal events being included.
In the initial Olympics featuring an autonomous Irish Free State, later the Irish Republic, in Paris in 1924, only two out of the 48 athletes were women – Phoebe Blair-White and Hilda Wallis, who competed in women’s tennis singles, doubles, and mixed doubles. Leading the vanguard on the Olympic platform over the past century include pioneering female athletes like Dorothy ‘Tommy’ Dermody, a competitor in fencing at the 1948 London Olympics.
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Having reached the age of 102, Dermody coincidentally served as a physical education instructor to a young student from Kilkenny named Maeve Shankey at Alexandra College in Dublin. In 1956, Shankey, known then as Maeve Kyle, made history as the first female athlete from Ireland to partake in the Olympics athletic competitions. She competed in both the 100m and 200m events, the longest track events available to women during that period in Melbourne. Although Kyle predominantly preferred the 400m, women were not permitted to compete in this length until eight years later in 1964.
The range of women’s track events has incrementally increased since then. The 1,500m was included in the 1972 Olympic Games. Surprisingly, it wasn’t until the 1984 Games that women were given permission to run the marathon.
At the period of the Melbourne Olympic Games, Kyle was a 28-year-old woman who was married and had a two-year-old daughter.