Ciara Mageean, who has died of bowel cancer aged 34, was an Irish athlete who was crowned European 1500 metres champion in 2024; she won three other European medals as well as Commonwealth silver, and competed at two Olympic Games.

On the last lap of the 1500m final at the 2024 European Championships in Rome she was boxed in behind the British pair, Georgia Bell and Jemma Reekie, and the Frenchwoman Agathe Guillemot, but she pushed herself through a tiny gap between the two Brits and surged away to win in 4min 04.66sec. “Brilliant stuff from her,” said the BBC commentator. “Words can’t even come close” to describing how she felt, she said.

Ciara Mageean was from north of the border, born on March 12 1992 in Portaferry, Co Down, one of three girls and a boy; her father was Christopher, her mother Catherine. While she was keen on most sports, particularly camogie – she played for Portaferry – she also loved drama and Irish dancing.

She began to make waves in school cross-country, but as her mother recalled, “To be honest, Ciara wasn’t interested. She just wanted to play camogie at that stage.”

But after a while, as she also began to impress on the track, her parents realised that she had a talent for running and “dragged her along” to the Mary Peters Track in Belfast. She finally caught the athletics bug, and there followed a gruelling schedule of 15-hour days juggling studies and training.

She would catch a ferry across Strangford Lough and take a bus to Assumption Grammar School in Ballynahinch, Co Down. After school she would catch the bus into Belfast and do her a homework in a cafe while she waited for her mother to pick her up and take her to the Mary Peters Track.

The hard work began to pay off as Ciara won a string of junior titles, culminating in 1500m gold at the European Youth Olympics in Finland in 2009: “She pulverised some of the best athletes in Europe,” recalled her junior coach, Eamonn Christie. In 2010 she reached the Commonwealth Games 1500m final in Delhi and took 1500m silver at the world junior championships, in Moncton, Canada, and there was another silver at the 2011 European junior championships in Tallinn.

A bad ankle injury kept her out of the 2012 London Olympics, but working with her coach in Dublin, Jerry Kiernan, she gradually made her way back to full fitness. “Jerry brought her up from zero,” recalled her mother. “That takes a determination within you to come back and not to lose hope, not to lose that faith that you can be back where you were.”

In 2014 she won the Irish 1500m title and two years later she took European 1500m bronze in Amsterdam, but at the Rio Olympics that year she went out in the semi-finals.

In 2017, she graduated with a BSc in physiotherapy from University College Dublin and crossed the Irish Sea to join Steve Vernon’s Team New Balance in Manchester. In 2019 she took European indoor bronze in Glasgow, then the following year, in a Diamond League meet in Monaco, she knocked 3.6 seconds off Sonia O’Sullivan’s Irish 1,000m record that had stood for 27 years.

At the delayed Tokyo Olympics in 2021 a calf injury prevented her from getting out of the heats, but the following year, coached by the former Olympic Helen Clitheroe, she won 1500m silvers at the Commonwealth Games in Birmingham and the European Championships in Munich, both times behind the redoubtable Scot, Laura Muir.

That year, at a Diamond League event in Brussels, Ciara Mageean broke another Sonia O’Sullivan record, knocking 2.22sec off her Irish 1500m record, and in 2023 she took more than two seconds off Sonia O’Sullivan’s mile mark. That year she was named Northern Ireland Sports Personality of the Year, but in 2024 an Achilles injury forced her out of the Paris Olympics.

She is survived by her husband Thomas Moran, whom she married at Belfast City Hall a few weeks before her death.