Nicola Tuthill

Nicola, whose dad Norman built her a throwing circle on the family’s dairy farm in her mid-teens, was the youngest member of the athletics squad for Paris, and one of the youngest on the entire Irish team. She impressed by finishing ninth in the European final at her first major senior competition and, in May, became only the second Irish woman to throw over 70 metres after Eileen O’Keefe, extending her Irish U23 record. Nicola, an Ad Astra student in UCD where she studies science, is only the third female Irish thrower to become an Olympian, following Patricia ‘Pat’ Walsh (ninth in discus in 1984), and world finalist O’Keeffe who competed in the hammer in 2008.