Brendan Boyce’s place for this summer’s Olympics was made official today as Team Ireland selected seven athletes to compete across the Marathon and 50km Race Walk events in Sapporo this summer.
Boyce will compete at the Olympics for a third time in his career tackling the 50k walk on Friday 6th August.
The Milford native who walks under the Finn Valley club was the first Irish athlete across all sports to achieve an Olympic qualification time and will compete in the race alongside Alex Wright.
In the Marathon, Fionnuala McCormack is heading into her fourth Olympic Games, she first became an Olympian in Beijing 2008. She is joined by Aoife Cooke in the Women’s Marathon, and Paul Pollock, Kevin Seaward and Stephen Scullion will compete in the Men’s Marathon.
These events were originally scheduled to take place in Tokyo but were moved to the more northern city of Sapporo where the temperatures were considered more suited to endurance events.
This is the first of two Team Ireland Tokyo announcements for athletics, with the second one scheduled for early July, and which will name the track and field athletes who will be selected, as well as athletes in the 20km Race Walk.
Team Ireland has currently 10 officially selected athletes, and at the moment 79 athletes have achieved qualification spots, with many more waiting on final ranking confirmation.
