Former Villanova runner Patrick Tiernan is finally ready to cross his Olympic finish line

In 2021, Patrick Tiernan was one of the top stories of the Olympics — for all the wrong reasons.

In the 10,000-meter run, the Villanova grad was in the mix for the podium with just one lap left in the final. But just 180 meters away from the finish line, Tiernan collapsed because of heat exhaustion. The Australian ultimately pulled himself across the final meters but finished 19th.

The video of Tiernan crossing the finish line went viral on social media, with fans worldwide praising his guts and effort in finishing the race. But it didn’t feel like a triumphant moment for Tiernan.

“It was very hard to respond to and receive those messages in the way that they were intended at the time,” Tiernan said. “It realistically took me up to 12 months to actually see it right. But I think when I started seeing a more positive side of it, how I see it now is that, I didn’t get the medal that I wanted, I didn’t nearly get the finish that I wanted, but I was willing to put myself in a position to do that. It was the best race of my life, up till the end. I can always be very proud of that, that I put myself in a position to do something that I wanted to do, just fell short at the end.”

» READ MORE: Mike Sielski: Joel Embiid expects to learn ‘nothing’ from the Olympics. The way he’s playing, he’s right.

Now, he’s back for his third Olympic Games, this time competing in the marathon for Australia.

Every Olympics, Tiernan runs a bit farther.

At his first games in Rio de Janeiro in 2016, Tiernan ran in the 5,000 meters and ultimately didn’t qualify for the final. Later that year, he won a national championship in cross-country at Villanova, winning the 6,000-meter race. In 2021, Tiernan ran the 10,000 meters. Now in 2024, Tiernan will run the men’s marathon.

“Being 6-foot-2, and a bigger frame when it comes to long-distance running, with that there has to be a bit of patience, and a bit of a learning curve in order to get the body right to run 26 miles at the pace that you want to run at,” Tiernan said. “We only ever did 5ks while I was in college, and then I transitioned to the 10k slowly, after a few more years, got introduced to the half-marathon and stuff like that. I feel like the marathon was always an event that was waiting for me at the top end. It was just a matter of when I was going to progress to it naturally and in a safe way, where, once I get there, I can have a long, healthy career with it.”

In 2016, just making the Games was the big achievement. Of course, every competitor wants to win a medal, but Tiernan was still early in his track career. He was physically prepared to compete, but until he stepped onto the blocks, he’d almost forgotten he was racing in the Olympics — he was so excited to just be there.

“All of a sudden, I was trying to mentally process that in the three seconds before the gun went off,” Tiernan said.

» READ MORE: Penn grad Nia Akins is about to release her first album. But first: Compete in the 800 meters at the Olympics.

In 2021, he was mentally prepared, but not physically prepared, which hit even harder since he had an extra year to train. After his performance, he was dropped by his sponsor, and it took him more than a year to process what had happened and reset. He started his 2022 season “running angry,” but he still wasn’t getting the results he wanted, and it was taking a toll on his body. Then in 2023, he suffered an injury, pulling out of marathons where he was scheduled to compete.

“It took calling some people who have been mentors for me, or been rocks for me in the past, and figuring out who I was before that Olympics and how I got there in the first place,” Tiernan said. “Reinstituting some values and some training concepts that had worked for me in the past. And that’s what we did this past fall, was go back to basics and figure out what’s worked for me and what things can we add that it isn’t going to overstimulate the system.

“Definitely not forgetting what happened to you, more so trying to use both the positives and the negatives of that experience to give myself a net positive going into Paris.”

» READ MORE: The U.S. women’s rugby sevens shocked the world, and an Upper Merion alum lent a key hand

Tiernan officially qualified for his third Olympics in January, after placing fourth in the Houston Marathon in 2 hours, 7 minutes, and 45 seconds, the second-fastest marathon ever run by an Australian, and meeting the Olympic qualifying standard of 2:08:10.

The biggest emotion he felt? Relief. He would have the opportunity to rewrite his Olympic story.

» READ MORE: A cheesesteak in Paris: Was it possible to find the perfect Philly sandwich in France?

“I haven’t really had a good experience, or the experience that I wanted to have, at an Olympics, or even at a world championship,” Tiernan said. “For me, that’s been the mental preparation is not putting too much pressure on the outcome of the race, but more so trying to envision what a positive day would be.”

This time, his positive day focuses on executing his race plan. With the marathon, it’s harder to tell how your competitors are doing over the full distance than on a track, where you can see every runner the entire time. Until the final 10 kilometers, you can only focus on yourself, Tiernan said.

“2016 was a positive experience. But I look back on it, I wasn’t there to compete,” Tiernan said. “I was more so just there to be a participant in that event. [In] 2021, I definitely went in with this mindset of, ‘I want to medal. I can medal; that’s the goal.’ At the end of the day, medaling at the Olympics is a really hard thing to do. If that’s the only goal that you have going into something, there’s a good chance you’re going to walk away disappointed from that event. I had the experience in Tokyo that I had because I was so, so focused on getting that one goal that I set out for the day, rather than the goal being executing a race plan.

“I think if you have a race plan that you want to execute on the day, whether you win or finish 15th, if you execute the race plan, and other people just had a better day, I think that’s a positive outcome, because you’ve done what you went there to do, and, ultimately, you’ve accepted the fact that you can’t control what they do. You can only control what you’re doing.”