Beloved figure of Irish athletics, Pat Naughton, passes away aged 92

A beloved figure on the Irish athletics scene, Naughton won national masters medals every year between 1972 and 2024, adding three more of them last August, winning the long jump, shot put and 100m in the over-90 category.

His competition? At that point, it was just with himself, but Naughton espoused the truth in that phrase that we don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.

He passed away on Saturday and was laid to rest in his native Nenagh this morning, ending one of the longest-running careers of a national senior champion in any sport.

In his youth, Naughton won three national senior titles in the decathlon before he gave up athletics at the age of 28, a retirement that lasted 10 years. During his masters career, he accrued north of 350 medals, including five at European level.

As he aged, his times inevitably slowed, but what never left him was the love for the sport or his fastidious commitment. At the national masters last year, he ran the 100m in 30.68 seconds, managed 1.62m in the long jump and threw 6.02m in the shot put.

Five years ago, a few months into the first Covid-19 lockdown, I interviewed Naughton for the Irish Independent, writing a story about him continuing to train even while stuck at home. He was 87 at the time and when he picked up the phone, he’d just finished a 90-minute session of digging in his garden. He was doing 15 minutes of training every morning and another five in the evening, darting along the hall or doing strength exercises. The accompanying photo, taken by Stephen McCarthy of Sportsfile, received a World Press Photo Award the following year.

Three days a week, into his late 80s, he would knock out a 90-minute session of running, throwing and jumping at the indoor track down the road from him in Nenagh, which his brother, Seán – a long-time manager of the Irish senior athletics team – was instrumental in building.

Naughton was a baby when Bob Tisdall won gold in the 400m hurdles for Ireland at the 1932 Olympics in Los Angeles, and he grew up idolising Tisdall, calling him his “patron saint”. Naughton had the chance to join his hero on the roll of honour as a national 400m hurdles champion many years later, leading over the final barrier before being caught near the line. Sixty years on from that race, he ran into the gold medallist and Naughton joked that he’d let him win, though of course his competitive fire would never allow that. As he said: “I wouldn’t let a child beat me running, never mind a competitor.”

Each spring and summer, year after year, decade after decade, Naughton trained for the national masters like it was “an Olympic event” and he competed internationally until the age of 82. His son, Joe, was also a three-time national decathlon champion and when Pat suggested in recent years that his days of going abroad might be behind him, Joe was quick to set him straight. “He said: ‘Don’t ever have the word never in your vocabulary’,” recalled Naughton.

His chief advice for the young generation of athletes was to avoid training on the road. “I think it’s not great for the limbs, you can’t beat the grass,” he said. “I think they’re burning out a lot of people in a lot of sports.”

In his latter years, Naughton had to stop doing the hurdles due to a hamstring issue, but he maintained remarkably good health. Part of that was due to his fastidious routine, with Naughton doing a few mobility exercises before getting out of bed every morning.

In 2023, he starred in the RTÉ programme Super Agers, and while many might wonder if some magic supplement helped him stay active, Naughton said his approach to nutrition was simple: “I’m convinced if you have a sensible diet and if you eat things you like, you don’t have to (take) any multi-vitamins.”

His approach was always rooted in common sense: training enough but not too much, and doing it consistently: week after week, year after year, always giving it his best, running right to the finish.