Lauren Roy goes into the European Championships in Birmingham this week as the national leader in two events, with personal bests across the board this season and three events on her programme. She is also, in her own words, completely sponsor free.
Both of those things are true at the same time, and that is the story of an awful lot of Irish athletes right now. But Lauren is worth listening to on it, because she has built this the slow way, from a Ballymena schoolgirl who just liked winning sports days to a triple Northern Ireland record holder, and she has never once wavered on where she thinks it ends up.
"I've always known that I'm not just doing athletics to do athletics. I'm not just at the competitions to be there for fun. I know that at some point I will be one of the greatest."
She is twenty five, she has just finished four years in the American collegiate system, and she is about to find out what she looks like as a professional.
Ballymena and the Horses
Lauren was the kid who did everything. Hockey, whatever was going at school, and horse riding, which she stuck at for the guts of ten years and was properly good at.
"Show jumping, kind of like in the arena, things like that. I just loved it."
She gave it up at fifteen or sixteen, and the reason tells you where her head already was.
"I was too scared that obviously if you fall off, that's the track career done for the year. So I had to give it up."
She never got the horse she always wanted, and she is fairly relaxed about that now given she has spent the last four years living in Texas.
The athletics started around fourteen, and it started for the simplest reason there is.
"I was always winning sports days and I just loved winning so much. I'm so competitive. It's probably pretty cliche for an athlete to say that, but I just loved winning."
She joined a club and, brilliantly, fell in love with the high jump first, which she is happy to laugh at herself about now.
"I actually loved high jump at the time, which is crazy because I'm 5'3", so that didn't last too long."
Between the club sessions and the other sports, the speed became obvious. A few sprints sessions later, in 2015, she won her first Irish Schools title, and that was that.
The One Who Came Up the Hard Way
There is a certain kind of Irish sprinter who wins everything from under twelves upwards and arrives on the senior scene fully formed. Lauren was not that, and she is very clear eyed about it.
"Every athlete develops differently. Some of the Irish girls had amazing and still have amazing performances but mainly when they're younger, and I maybe didn't have that as much."
What she did instead was grind her way up, competition by competition, through a load of international trips that never made a headline anywhere.
"I've been to so many international competitions that people maybe don't even know I've been to. I've been substitute for relays at world relays and just gradually over the years I've never given up and I've worked my way onto the relays. I've worked my way into individual events."
That patience is why this season reads the way it does. National leader in two events. Three events at a European Championships. Personal bests everywhere you look.
"I definitely think my time is here. I'm just improving more and more each year, so I'm definitely getting into my prime right now and I'm just excited to see where the next few years goes."
Two Years at Queen's, Four Years in Texas
Lauren did two years at Queen's University Belfast before moving to the United States, and she is careful to give her Irish coaches their due. She was a strong contender in Irish sprinting long before she left, travelling up to Belfast for facilities and making it work the way Irish athletes do.
What Texas gave her was everything in one place.
"Having everything not essentially handed to me, but accessible would be the right word. Trying to balance studies, it made it a lot easier to live that student athlete lifestyle. Having a structure to your day that is based around track and your study, so you never really have to sacrifice one or the other."
She went to UTSA first, under Kareem Street-Thompson, and the sessions were a shock to the system for a few weeks before she settled.
"Just as someone who's never really had that experience before, it was like wow straight away."
She measures herself by progression rather than by other people's personal bests, and the progression in those first two years told her she had made the right call. Then she did something that takes a fair bit of self knowledge, which was to leave a place she loved because she could see where the ceiling was.
"I am an athlete who really knows what they need to go to the next level again. UTSA was fantastic, but I developed there very well and I needed just a little extra step, and that's why I went to Tarleton State. It was again the right decision and I did take that next step."
Tarleton meant working with Tim Thompson and an elevated version of everything she was used to, three sessions a week in the weight room, and a full autumn semester of work banked before the indoor and outdoor seasons. Her current coach is Kevin Schneider, who she refers to throughout as Coach Kev, and the two of them are now deep in the technical detail of turning a collegiate sprinter into a professional one.
For any young Irish athlete weighing up the same move, and for the parents who usually have the harder questions, she has thought this through.
"I definitely say to anyone that has a feeling they should go, do it. If you truly think that's what's going to work for you, then don't hesitate."
She also felt that pull at seventeen or eighteen and decided it was not her time, and she reckons she was right about that too. She went at twenty one instead.
"Every athlete is going to flourish with different programs, different coaching. It's not one size fits all. Ultimately it comes down to which coaching program is going to progress you individually as an athlete, not which coach progresses other athletes."
What the NCAA Actually Gives You
The obvious benefits of American collegiate athletics are the facilities and the coaching. The one Lauren rates highest is harder to buy, and it is the noise.
Irish athletes do most of their racing in front of family and a few hundred people. NCAA sprinters race in stadiums, on television, with a crowd, several rounds deep, for four years straight. By the time a major championship comes around, none of it is new.
"Take World Indoors this year for example. I got there and I wasn't even nervous. And not in like a I can't be bothered way, in like a I've been here before way. And I hadn't been to World Indoors before, but I was so prepared for it."
She surpassed her ranking there, and she puts that squarely down to the four years behind it.
"My last four years in the NCAA has set me up so well now for pursuing a professional career in sprinting and making global championships regularly."
She breaks those four years down neatly. Year one was testing the waters. Year two was knuckling down. Year three was understanding herself, her body and her training. Year four was everything coming together.
"I used the previous three years to create the model for this year, put it all together, and that has produced this end result."
It helps that she has been injury free throughout, which she describes as a dream scenario and which anyone who has read the other interviews in this series will appreciate the value of.
Nationals, and Taking It on the Chin
The Irish nationals came at the end of a season that started in the first week of January, and she is realistic about what that does to a body.
"You have to be realistic when you've been peaking since January and we're now in August. There's going to be repercussions for that, which is totally normal as an NCAA athlete."
The conditions did not help anybody. She took silver in the 200m into a headwind, and while she knows from her own results this year that there was a lot more in her, she was pleased with it in a field that deep.
The 100m the following day did not go to plan, and she deals with it in a couple of sentences that say plenty about where her head is.
"It's all learning experiences for me. Not just physically but mentally and emotionally. I have to learn that maybe sometimes I won't agree with the decisions that officials make, or the extent to which these decisions are made, but at the end of the day they're the ones that are there for a reason. They're the officials. They know what they're talking about. So you just have to take it on the chin and move on."
Nationals, and Taking It on the Chin
She is doubling and then some in Birmingham, and that is a deliberate decision she and Coach Kevin Schexnayder took together, on the basis that four years of NCAA conference championships across three and four days have left her well able for it.
What she is not bringing is expectation.
"It's not like I'm going out there with a target on my head of being a defending champion, of being a European leader. That's not what I am this year. I will be that in the future, but not this year."
The plan is to handle her business, take it round by round, and see what happens. On her 200m times this season she is good enough to make the final, and she says so plainly without making a promise of it.
Beyond this week comes the interesting part. Next season is her first outside the collegiate system, so she stays in Texas with Coach Kevin Schexnayder, takes the year at a slower and less punishing rhythm, and gets the flexibility to come back to Europe for the meets that matter. National indoors, European indoors, then the World Championships in 2027, and she believes she will be running qualifying standards rather than chasing ranking points to get there.
"That's the ultimate goal and I think I'm right on track for making that team."
After that, Los Angeles in 2028.
The Part Nobody Puts on the Highlight Reel
Here is where the reality of Irish athletics comes in, and Lauren is refreshingly straight about it.
"Unfortunately I am completely sponsor free."
She receives funding from the Jerry Kiernan Foundation, who selected her as an award recipient this year, and Athletics Northern Ireland provided her with a stipend this season which covered a good chunk of the flights back and forth. Everything else is her own, and her own means her parents.
"I'm so immensely grateful for any support, no matter how small or big, from anyone."
What she describes next is a gap that will be familiar to a lot of athletes in this country, and it is the most honest answer anybody has given in this series.
"If I'm totally transparent, I am in a position where the future is very uncertain financially for myself. It's such a gap for athletes that are at my level of performance. You're definitely good enough to make something of your career, but you're just on the brink of getting there."
She is a woman of faith and it clearly steadies her.
"I'm a big believer in God, so I really just trust that God's plan will figure itself out as it always does."
So the picture is a national leader in two events, a triple national record holder, three events at a European Championships, and no idea yet how next season gets paid for. That is worth sitting with the next time somebody assumes the athletes on the television are professionals in the way footballers are.
Who Keeps Lauren Level
For someone that sure of where she is going, Lauren Roy is remarkably grounded, and she knows exactly who to thank for it.
"If my mom and dad didn't take me to practice all those years ago, I wouldn't be where I am today. If they didn't financially support me to this day, I wouldn't be here."
She is emphatic that they deserve more credit than they get.
"Obviously coaches and athletes get the spotlight, but I think parents sometimes deserve it just as much because of the support system that they do create. Whether things go your way or they don't go your way, they're the ones that are always there whether they want to be or not."
Then there is her boyfriend Brice, who is a sprinter in the same training group, which means they are together for essentially every hour of the day and it somehow works.
"We both do sprints, we both have the same goals, the same aspirations, and to be able to lift each other up and support each other on the days that we don't feel like training, or want to eat unhealthy. We're both there to correct each other and support each other when we do well."
His family have become her second family and her home away from home, which matters more than it sounds when you have moved to the other side of the world at twenty one.
Her inspiration comes mostly from the people beside her rather than from anybody famous. Her coach, her family, Brice, and the Irish athletes she watches every day and genuinely wants to see win.
"If I believe in myself and they believe in me, that's kind of all I need."
And Away From the Track
Lauren is not going to pretend to be interesting about her downtime, which is exactly why she is good company.
"I actually love to play the Xbox. And I hate when people are like, oh, a gamer girl, because I don't give that vibe off at all. But I love just sitting down, relaxing, playing my Xbox."
Fortnite and Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege are the two she keeps coming back to, and she is very happy to tell you that she is not the athlete who reads and goes for long walks.
"I am really that person that just stays inside and kind of doesn't do too much. So that's probably my main hobby, honestly."
The music is broad, though if you audited the playlist it would be mostly UK rap, which she reckons nobody would guess from her Instagram. It goes on the second she leaves the hotel and stays on right through the warm up, until the officials take the headphones off her at the call room door.
"That's kind of my way of getting locked in. Headphones on, block out all the noise, and just be focused."
She has spent six years working her way from the back of relay squads to the front of the Irish rankings, and she has paid for most of it herself. Lauren Roy races in Birmingham this week, in three events, with no expectations and absolutely no shortage of belief.
Cover Photo: Tarleton State Track
