Conall Mahon’s successful season continued last weekend as he became an Irish Universities double champion.

The Irvinestown athlete had claimed gold in the Triple Jump event at the Irish Universities Indoor Championships in Athlone back in February and he was to double up last weekend as he secured the Irish Universities Outdoor title at the Mary Peters Track.

Indeed, it required a big final jump for Mahon to seal the gold medal, the Fermanagh man sitting second going into the final round before producing a jump of exactly 14m to see him take the title with 20cms to spare over second placed Shane Howard.

The win was made all the more impressive by the fact that Mahon, who was representing NUI Galway, had missed a lot of training in the lead up to the event.

“To be honest I wasn’t feeling great going into the championships as I had missed a lot of training with niggles and had also been away on a field trip. On the day though I felt okay although I was slow to get going and my first four jumps were poor,” he said.

However, when the pressure came on towards the end of the event, Mahon was able to produce decisive jumps.

“My fifth jump took me into second place and then with my last jump I pulled it out of the bag. To do it late like that is a great way to win it, it was a brilliant buzz. The competition was quite a high standard and I had to jump close to my personal best on the last jump to win it,” he added.

Mahon’s personal best in outdoors competition is 14.18m so he was only 18cm short of that as he leapt to the title.

With exams on the horizon, competitions will have to take a back seat for a while for Conall but he has already his sights set on the All Ireland U23 title in the summer.

“I have exams coming up so I won’t be competing for a month and half but I’ll be doing a hard training cycle and then there are a couple of competitions in late May. The main focus though is the All Ireland U23s at the end of June and I’ll be looking to get into my best shape for that. I want to try and win my first All Ireland underage title,” he commented.