Slowing Down to Go Faster: The Rhasidat Adeleke Lesson on Turnaround Strategy

I am a huge fan of Rhasidat Adeleke. From her beginnings in Tallaght, Dublin, she has gone from extraordinary junior talent to one of the biggest names in Irish athletics, competing at the Olympics, winning major international medals and helping put Irish sprinting firmly on the map.

What made me want to write this piece wasn't simply what she has achieved on the track. It was what happened after she won a silver medal in Birmingham, having arrived at the championships with plenty of questions around her form and with few expecting her to come away with a medal.

Her interview immediately after the race, and the way she spoke to the press in the days that followed, made me take note. There was a refreshing honesty and vulnerability to it. She spoke openly about the doubt, the pressure and the moments when she had questioned herself, even admitting that she had wondered whether at times during the last two years, in her own words, “cooked”.

That got me thinking.

Adeleke's story is no longer simply about how fast she can run and how great she can become It is becoming a fascinating case study in what happens when things don't go to plan, how you respond when confidence disappears, and the difficult decision of knowing when to step back, reset and change direction.

And perhaps most importantly, it is a reminder that sometimes slowing down is exactly what you need to do to go faster.

Going back to basics

As a junior, Adeleke had already made her name over the 100m and 200m, winning major medals including the European U18 200m title and later the European U20 100m and 200m double.

She then moved into the 400m and became one of the best quarter-milers in the world, eventually becoming the first Irish woman to break 50 seconds and finishing fourth in the Olympic 400m final in Paris. But since the Olympics, the wheels started to come off.

Injuries and inconsistent performances saw her 400m season best fall to 50.42 in 2025. She went from being ranked fourth in the world to dropping out of the 400m world rankings altogether, before admitting she had questioned whether she was “cooked”.

Very recently, Adeleke made the decision to return to the 200m, the distance where she had enjoyed so much success as a junior. It wasn't exactly an obvious move as she had focused on the 400m event for the last number of years. She ran 23.07 in Lucerne before scraping into the European Championships with 22.80 at the Irish Nationals. Then, six weeks later, she ran 22.28 for European silver and a new Irish record. The turnaround is remarkable. But what I find most interesting is that returning to the 200m wasn't some completely new reinvention. It was almost the opposite. She went back to something she already knew she could do and, importantly, something she was comfortable doing.

In the six weeks she had to prepare for the Europeans she decided to spend that time back on terra firma, back in Dublin and surrounded by friends and family rather than training in Texas where she has been based since going to University. The plan was to strip things back and, perhaps most importantly, rediscover some of the enjoyment that had been missing. I think this is the really interesting part.

When we're struggling, the natural reaction is usually to work harder at fixing the problem. More analysis, more training, more pressure. We look for the magic switch that will turn everything around. Sometimes, though, you need to step away from it entirely. And that is always hard to comprehend and even harder to do.

Coming home allowed Adeleke to step away and into a different environment. She was back surrounded by people who knew her before the medals, the Nike deal and all the expectations that came with them. And it seems to have worked. Adeleke came into the Europeans as a complete underdog in the 200m. Against red-hot favourite Amy Hunt, she ran 22.28, was pipped on the line and set a new Irish record on the way to European silver. The silver was impressive, but it was what she said afterwards that really caught my attention.

Adeleke said she was “taking everything a day at a time” and trying to relax and enjoy the experience. That sounds somewhat cliché, but she also admitted that the weight of expectation had started to become too much.

As her performances improved and she became world class, she said the pressure had built, both from herself and from everyone around her.

“I almost let it consume me a little bit,” she said.

She also thanked the people around her who had helped her through those six weeks and talked about the importance of having people around her who helped to keep her “cup full”.

That analogy really stuck with me.

She said the difficulty and adversity had brought her back to “why I do it in the first place”.

Over those six weeks, Rhasidat had gone soul searching. Figuring out who she was, why she did it, why she started and who she did it for.

The business lesson

This is where her story starts to feel familiar to anyone who has been around a struggling business. When something isn't working, we tend to do more. More products, more sales activity, more initiatives, more meetings. Sometimes that's exactly what is needed. Sometimes it makes things worse.

There is a concept in turnaround strategy called retrenchment. The idea is fairly simple: when a business is struggling, sometimes the first step is to pull back, simplify and stabilise before trying to grow again.

Doing this can be one of the hardest decisions to make because it means accepting that something isn't working. When you're entrenched in a problem, that can be difficult to see. Naturally, the lens gets narrow and you become focused on protecting the decisions you've already made rather than asking whether they're still the right ones.

There is a very Irish example of this in Ryanair and the story is well known. They were struggling badly in the early 1990s and its model wasn't working. The decision was made to go back to basics, cut routes, adopt a much simpler low-cost model and become much clearer about what it wanted to be.

The result was one of the great Irish business turnarounds. The interesting bit isn't that Ryanair eventually grew; it's that it had to get simpler before it could get bigger.

The hardest decision

I think there is a parallel with Adeleke. She didn't need another big reinvention. She made the decision to simplify things, changed her environment and returned to an event where she already knew she could perform.

And doing this she rediscovered something that is very easy to lose when performance becomes everything: enjoyment.

Businesses can become just as entrenched as people and high performance athletes . A strategy that worked five years ago becomes difficult to challenge because so much has been built around it. Teams grow, processes multiply and more gets added. Eventually, you can end up spending more time managing the complexity you have just created rather than doing the things that you were good at originally.

Slowing down to go faster

There is a tendency in business and in life to think resilience means doubling down and working harder. And parts of that are true.

But the older I get, the more I think resilience is also recognising when what you're doing isn't working, having the courage to change it, keeping showing up and, perhaps most importantly, keeping your cup full.

That is what Rhasidat's story has reminded me of.

A turnaround doesn't always start with doing more or doing it harder. Sometimes it starts by stepping back, creating some space and rediscovering what made you want to do it in the first place.

Sometimes, you have to slow down to go faster.

Blog by Padraig O'Donnell