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MEET THE NOMINEES
World podiums in two rival systems, a new world title and a global fitness crown turned 2025 into a career peak for Aoife OโRourke. Across boxingโs turbulent governance landscape she stayed at the very top, reaching two world finals, winning gold under the sportโs new Olympic-aligned body and closing the year ranked World No. 1 at middleweight.
In Liverpool she claimed the inaugural World Boxing Championships title at 75 kg, beating Turkeyโs Busra Isildar by unanimous decision after earlier victories over opponents from the Czech Republic, Norway and China. It was Irelandโs first world title under the new federation and a statement result during a key transition for the sport.
Earlier in the year she reached the final of the IBA Womenโs World Championships in Niลก, taking silver at the last major event under the previous structure and underlining her status across both organisations in the same season. Away from the ring she and her sister Lisa won the HYROX Womenโs Doubles World Championship in Anaheim, adding a global functional-fitness title to an already exceptional year.
At home she retained the Irish Elite middleweight crown, extending her domestic dominance. The combination of world titles, dual world finals, a No. 1 global ranking and multi-sport success marked 2025 as one of the outstanding campaigns in Irish boxing history.
In 2025, Claire Melia pushed Irish basketball into new territory. As a key interior presence for BAXI Ferrol in Spain, she helped drive the club to the FIBA EuroCup Women Final and became the first Irish woman to win a European club medal, delivering performances that stood out across the continent.
Her influence was felt throughout Ferrolโs knockout run, most memorably in the semi-final where she produced a 27-point game, one of the standout individual displays of the EuroCup season. She then anchored the team through both legs of the final, securing a European silver medal and giving Irish basketball a breakthrough moment on the professional stage.
Meliaโs form was recognised with the EuroCup MVP of the Month award in March 2025, highlighting her as one of the competitionโs most impactful forwards. Later in the year she returned to the Ireland senior team, earning selection for the FIBA EuroBasket 2027 qualifiers and bringing elite European experience back into the national setup.
Her 2025 campaign combined individual excellence, historic firsts and visible leadership in one of Europeโs top leagues, setting a new benchmark for what Irish players can achieve in professional basketball.
No Irish swimmer reshaped the record books in 2025 quite like Ellen Walshe. Over the course of a single year She reached two World Championship finals, won multiple European medals, dominated the World Cup circuit, and shattered over 15 Irish records across medley and butterfly – the most ever broken by an Irish swimmer in a single season.
At the World Aquatics Championships in Singapore she reached the finals of the 200m Individual Medley and 200m Butterfly, placing inside the worldโs top eight in both events and setting a new Irish record of 2:10.49 in the IM semi-final. She then carried that form into the World Cup series, taking 400m IM gold in Westmont and Toronto, the latter in 4:22.97 โ more than two seconds inside her own national record โ and collecting multiple silver medals over 200m butterfly.
In November, Walshe then became the first Irish woman to top the podium at the European Short Course Championships as she won gold in a thrilling 200m butterfly final, in Poland.
Walshe’s fifteen + Irish records, the highest ever in one season by an Irish swimmer, included the rewriting of marks that had stood since the 1990s. She now holds senior records in the 200m and 400m IM, the 100m and 200m butterfly, and a full slate of short-course IM and butterfly events, spanning sprint and distance across two strokes.
Those performances placed her inside the top ten of the 2025 World Cup rankings and earned her Swim Irelandโs Performance Female Athlete of the Year award. The breadth and depth of her achievements confirmed her as one of the most complete swimmers Ireland has produced.
For Fiona Murtagh, 2025 was a year of reinvention at the very highest level. Moving from sweep rowing into the single scull, she climbed through a new event with remarkable speed, taking medals at every major regatta and claiming World Championship gold in one of the most dramatic finishes of the season.
Her defining moment came at the World Rowing Championships in Shanghai, where she won the W1x final by 0.03 seconds in a photo finish. The victory brought her a world title in one of rowingโs most demanding boat classes and placed her alongside Sanita Puspure among the few Irish women to have won the event.
Murtaghโs new chapter had taken shape earlier in the year with silver medals at the European Championships in Plovdiv and at World Cup II in Lucerne, often viewed as the sportโs ultimate form guide. Both results confirmed that her switch from sweep to single had been the right call and that she could match the worldโs best in her new discipline.
On the domestic front she stroked the University of Galway womenโs eight to an Irish national title and was later named World Rowingโs โRower of the Monthโ for her breakthrough season. The combination of world gold, consistent podiums and technical progression established her as one of the leading single scullers in world rowing.
Hannah Tyrrellโs final year in inter-county football could hardly have been scripted with more clarity. In 2025 she led Dublin to All-Ireland and Leinster titles, topped the scoring charts across the championship and swept the gameโs major individual awards before announcing her retirement on the Croke Park pitch.
In the TG4 All-Ireland Senior final she scored 0โ5 against Meath, three from frees and two from play, helping Dublin to a 2โ16 to 0โ10 victory despite suffering a late knee injury. It secured her second All-Ireland medal and closed a campaign in which she amassed 6โ28, enough to claim the ZuCar Golden Boot as top scorer across the Junior, Intermediate and Senior grades.
Earlier in the summer she had produced the turning point in the Leinster final, hitting a first-half goal that swung momentum Dublinโs way in a 2โ13 to 1โ12 win and sealed a twelfth consecutive provincial title. Her consistency from the Leinster semi-final through to the All-Ireland decider underpinned Dublinโs entire year.
Tyrrellโs peers recognised that influence by voting her the 2025 TG4 Senior Playersโ Player of the Year, while she also collected her third TG4 All-Star award. Retiring after lifting the Brendan Martin Cup, with an All-Ireland title, Golden Boot and Playersโ Player of the Year in the same season, she signed off with one of the most complete campaigns any Dublin forward has produced.
In combined events, few seasons in Irish history match what Kate OโConnor assembled in 2025. Across heptathlon and pentathlon she medalled at every major championship, pushed national records to new levels and delivered Irelandโs first global outdoor medal in the multi-events.
Her year was framed by silver at the World Championships in Tokyo, where she scored 6,714 points in the heptathlon, an Irish record built on five personal bests across the seven events. The performance put her on the World Championships podium as only the sixth Irish athlete ever to medal at that level, and Irelandโs first in a multi-event discipline.
Indoors she added silver at the World Indoor Championships in Nanjing with 4,742 points and bronze at the European Indoors in Apeldoorn, setting a national pentathlon record of 4,781 points at the latter. Between those results she secured heptathlon gold at the World University Games in Rhine-Ruhr, scoring 6,487 points and dominating the javelin competition.
Over the course of the season she broke Irish records in both the heptathlon and pentathlon and recorded lifetime bests in the hurdles, high jump, 200m, javelin and 800m. Her body of work placed her second in the 2025 world rankings and led to her being named Irish Athlete of the Year.
Katie McCabeโs 2025 campaign fused club glory, international influence and a level of durability rarely seen in elite football. She lifted the UEFA Womenโs Champions League with Arsenal, set a UEFA record for minutes played in a single womenโs club season and produced marquee performances for Ireland in Nations League action.
For Arsenal she started every game of the Champions League run, playing all 1,296 minutes across 15 matches โ the highest total ever logged in a single UEFA womenโs club season. In the final in Lisbon she completed the full match at left-back as Arsenal beat Barcelona 1โ0, becoming the fourth Irish woman to win the competition with the club after Emma Byrne, Ciara Grant and Yvonne Tracy.
Her impact stretched across the campaign, from delivering a key set-piece that led to a decisive goal in the quarter-final comeback against Real Madrid to a commanding two-leg display in the semi-final win over Lyon. In the WSL she made 20 league appearances as Arsenal finished second and scored a long-range goal in a 4โ3 win in March that underlined her attacking threat.
In an Ireland shirt she produced one of the standout international displays of the year in the 4โ2 Nations League playoff win over Belgium at the Aviva Stadium, scoring twice and forcing a third that went down as an own goal. She logged 585 minutes across fixtures against Tรผrkiye, Slovenia, Greece and Belgium, again among the squadโs most used players.
The combination of a Champions League title, a record-breaking European campaign and decisive performances as national-team captain further strengthened her standing as one of Irelandโs greatest modern footballers.
Across track and road, 2025 marked the season where Lara Gillespie moved into cyclingโs top tier. She became European and World Champion in the elimination race and delivered some of the best road results ever recorded by an Irish woman, all while riding her first full WorldTour year with UAE Team ADQ.
On the track she opened with gold at the UEC European Track Championships in Heusden-Zolder, winning the elimination race to become Irelandโs first senior European champion. Later in the year she doubled down at the UCI Track Cycling World Championships in Santiago, again winning the elimination race to take the rainbow jersey and become Irelandโs first female track world champion. She also finished sixth in the Omnium at those Worlds, highlighting her range across endurance events.
Her road programme added further weight to the year. Gillespie was among the first Irish riders to compete in the Tour de France Femmes and took third on Stage 4 from Saumur to Poitiers, securing Irelandโs first podium at the race. She added a general classification win at ร Travers Les Hauts de France and a string of major one-day results, including second at La Choralis Fourmies Fรฉminine and Omloop van het Hageland, and third at Le Samyn des Dames and Nokere Koerse.
At the UAE Tour Women she won the Intermediate Sprints jersey and delivered multiple top-10 stages while supporting teammate Elisa Longo Borghiniโs overall victory. Her performances were recognised with the Irish Times/Sport Ireland Sportswoman of the Month award for February. Taken together, her 2025 results established her as Irelandโs leading female cyclist and a recognised force across WorldTour and championship racing.
A double world title in New Delhi made 2025 the standout year of Orla Comerfordโs sprinting career. Racing in the T13 classification, she won both the 100 m and 200 m at the World Para Athletics Championships and confirmed her status among the fastest visually impaired sprinters in the world.
She opened the championships by winning the T13 100 m in 11.88 seconds, then returned two days later to take the 200 m in 24.71, holding off the defending champion to complete a clean sweep of the sprint events. The performances delivered two world gold medals at a single championships for Ireland and marked a major step forward for the national para-athletics programme.
Comerfordโs achievements added to a rรฉsumรฉ that already included multiple Paralympic Games appearances and a bronze medal from Paris 2024, but the double in New Delhi elevated her into a new bracket of global success. The season was also recognised at home when she was named the Irish Times Sportswoman of the Month in October 2025.
Competing with Stargardtโs disease in the T13 class, her 2025 campaign combined elite speed, championship consistency and a clear upward trajectory in performance, standing out as one of the signature years in Irish para-sport.
Sarah Healyโs 2025 season pushed Irish middle-distance running into new territory. Across 1500m and 3000m she won a European title, claimed her first Diamond League victory, reached a World Championships final and produced a set of personal bests that place her among the fastest Irish athletes of any era.
Indoors she struck gold at the European Championships in Apeldoorn, taking the 3000m title in 8:52.86 and becoming both the first Irish woman to win that race and Irelandโs first European Indoor champion since 2007. A few months later she won the 1500m at the Rome Diamond League in 3:59.17, her first win on the sportโs global circuit and a key signal of her ability to beat world-class fields.
At the World Championships in Tokyo she reached the 1500m final after progressing via appeal from the semi-finals, ultimately finishing tenth in 3:59.14 on her debut in an outdoor global final. Alongside those results she set new Irish indoor records in the 1500m (4:01.62) and 3000m (8:30.79) and added a National Championship Record over 1500m indoors.
Outdoors, her personal bests moved to a new level: 3:57.15 for 1500m, 8:27.02 for 3000m, 4:16.26 for the mile and 2:00.19 for 800m. That range, combined with consistent delivery in major finals, defined her 2025 campaign and confirmed her as a world-class middle-distance runner.
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