Ciarán Ó Lionáird, the former Irish 1,500 metres champion and London 2012 Olympian, has died suddenly at the age of 38. He was found dead in Montreal on Tuesday morning.

For Irish athletics, the news lands hardest because Ó Lionáird was never just another national titleholder. He reached the final of the 2011 World Championships in Daegu and finished 10th, then returned to win bronze in the 3,000m at the European Indoor Championships in Gothenburg in March 2013. He also won the Irish 1,500m title in Santry in July 2014, a reminder that even after the biggest stages, he could still turn up and deliver.

Ó Lionáird’s rise started far from the spotlight, in Toonsbridge outside Macroom, where he joined West Muskerry Athletic Club at the age of seven before later moving to Leevale in Cork. By age 16, he had already run 3:50.10, and in 2011 he transformed that raw promise into a 1,500m best of 3:34.46, having begun the summer at 3:48.36. That surge carried him into the World Championships and then, two months after Daegu, into the Nike Oregon Project in Portland, Oregon, before he later switched to Nike Track Club Elite in Eugene, Oregon.

His career never fully escaped injury. The interruptions kept coming, even as he built a résumé that included the London Olympics and a European outdoor final in 2014, where he was clipped and unable to finish. He announced his retirement before the Rio Olympics in 2016, at 28, after years in which the body often blunted what the talent had promised.

That is what makes his death feel sharper than a standard obituary. Ó Lionáird had been based in the United States since 2011, and in recent months had been living in Topanga, California, with work later taking him into shoe advising for Nike and the music and entertainment scene in Los Angeles. The cause of death has not been confirmed, and that unanswered question now sits alongside a record that, for all its interruptions, still carried him to the center of major championships.