Four Medals Only Tell Half the Story of Ireland’s Birmingham Success

There will be much celebration this week as Ireland's medal winning athletes return home from their heroics in Birmingham. No doubt there will be airport greetings and media interviews over the next few days. All is well deserved.

What the last week showed to me was Irish athletics is continuing to have a moment which has carried over from the European Championships in Rome two years ago. Perhaps the best testimony to this moment is the outsized number of Irish supporters who made the trip to Brum and made themselves heard in no uncertain terms each time a green singlet appeared.

There will be some dour types that will suggest that this championship was not as successful as the one prior, that while the medal count was matched, one silver was swapped out for a bronze. Truthfully such begrudgery will likely only be found in the darkest souls and the meanest corners of the nation and justifiable pride will inundate any predisposition to the negative.

There is however a problem with medal counts. It's what the media and casual fans focus on. The athletes themselves understand the importance of bringing home hardware. Medals have a way of opening up doors to the more prestigious meets which will follow Birmingham this year and next.

For those of us who really want to understand the sport though, we need to peer deeper into what happened at Alexander Stadium because it's not all about the medals. How do we judge the performance of this team of 48 men and women - the largest team Ireland has ever sent to the European Championship.

Irish Team, European Athletics Championships – Men and Women participation, 1946-2026

Scale on its own tells you something, but not enough. This is the biggest team Ireland has ever sent to a European Championship, comfortably clear of the 44 who traveled to Amsterdam ten years ago, and a different sport entirely from the four who made the trip to Stockholm in 1958. But a bigger team isn't automatically a better one. Doubling your entries doesn't double your class. So, the question stands unanswered. How does this Irish team stack up against teams of the past?

The answer lies not in the medal table but its lesser-known cousin, the placing table.

A placing table keeps track of the top eight performers across each event. Points are assigned based on position. First place yields 8 points, second 7 points, down to 1 point for eighth.

The logic is simple once you see it. A medal table is binary, it has no subtlety. You either stand on the podium, or you were a non-factor. No credit is assigned to an athlete who finished fourth by four hundredths of a second. Casual observers might shrug their shoulders at this omission, those who want to gauge the true health of the team know otherwise. A placing table has no such blind spot. It acknowledges world class performances required to achieve top eight status. It recognizes the virtue of medals by assigning a higher points total to those who make the podium while including those who followed in close order. It measures depth, not just peaks. If you want to gauge the health of a sport, pay close attention to depth.

Look at what that distinction reveals when you line placement points up against medals across the whole championship.

Medals vs. placement points, bubble size = team size, ECH26 Birmingham

The two measures track each other closely, which is exactly what you'd expect since medals are the heaviest weighted part of the points formula. Italy's squad of 124 athletes leads the way, topping all countries with 22 medals and 227 placing points. However, it's the outliers that make the case for looking past the podium. The Hungarian team of 49 left Birmingham with just two medals but they outscored Ireland by two points in the placing table. Which is the better team? Perhaps a head-to-head match would enlighten us further.

Ireland and Ukraine, two nations with very little else in common, sit almost on top of each other on the chart: four medals each, and near identical points totals built from very different squads. Belgium lurks just to the right of both countries, the same medal count but more points, testimony to a deeper and bigger team despite the same medal count.

None of this is new information to the athletes themselves. Ask any distance runner who finished fifth in a European final whether that day mattered, and you will not get a shrug for an answer.

Single championships are snapshots. What a placing table lets you do that a medal table cannot is build a proper trend line, because points accumulate in single digit increments across dozens of events rather than in the rare, lumpy currency of podium finishes. Zoom out to the last two and a half decades of Irish performances at these championships, set alongside the fastest improving nations in Europe regardless of size, and the shape of the story becomes obvious.

Top 5 growth countries, no population limit, plus Ireland – Placing points, 2002-2026

Ireland's line has nowhere near the violence of Italy's recent surge or Great Britain's sustained heft at the top of the table, and it shouldn't, those are larger federations with different resources to Athletics Ireland. But the trajectory for Ireland is unmistakably upward, and it has been for a decade. Thirteen points in 2018. Fifty-one in Birmingham. That is not a moment. That is a program finding its stride, and you would never see it this clearly by counting medals alone, because medals in a small federation arrive too rarely and too unevenly to draw an honest line through.

Sitting Ireland alongside similarly sized nations rather than the continent's population heavyweights sharpens the picture further.

Top 5 growth countries under 20M population, plus Ireland – Placing points, 2002-2026

Here Ireland is compared to more meaningful peers. These are countries that Ireland should reasonably aim to outperform. Clearly the Netherlands and Switzerland are moving aggressively upward. What can be learned from their approach? Ireland now belongs in this conversation. Ten years ago, it did not.

None of this is an argument against celebrating medals. Ireland's athletes earned every bit of the reception they’ll get this week, and they will have earned it again the next time they come home with hardware. But if you want to know whether Irish athletics is getting better and not just getting lucky in a handful of finals, the medal table was never going to tell you. The placing table already has.

Cover Photo: Perri Williams