The omens for the rest of 2025 were reasonably good when a trio of athletes all won medals within 36 minutes of each other at the European Indoor Championships in Apeldoorn at the start of March. Never in the long history of Irish athletics had three championship medals been won in such swift succession.
Still few people could have predicted that by the close of December that medal tally would rise to 25, a record international haul for Irish athletes across the various championship levels – including the pick of them all in 2025, the World Championships in Tokyo in September.
Those 25 medals were shared among 16 different Irish athletes, plus the two team medals won at the European Cross-Country Championships in Portugal last Sunday. Eight were gold and the multiple winners included Kate O’Connor (four), Nick Griggs and Nicola Tuthill (three), and Anika Thompson (two).
These also included a series of firsts, none more impressive than the first senior multi-event medals won by O’Connor in the pentathlon and heptathlon.
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Over the last 20 years we have reported on plenty of highs and lows on the international stage. The previous record for Irish athletes was the 14 medals won in 2019. In 2016 our tally was just three.
It’s rare for Irish athletics medals to be won across such a wide range of events, so here they are, in chronological order, from Apeldoorn to Lagoa, on the track and field, complete with a few special renditions of Amhrán na bhFiann.
The first three medals were all historic in their own right, as Mark English, Sarah Healy and O’Connor combined their individual brilliance to make it an unforgettable European Indoor Championships in Apeldoorn.
After coming away empty-handed from the last two editions of these championships (and Sarah Lavin finishing fourth in the 60m hurdles on the Saturday), nothing was won before Sunday’s final session in the Dutch city. But within those 36 minutes, Healy crowned her moment in gold by winning the 3,000m, straight after English won bronze in the 800m and O’Connor wrapped things up with another bronze in the pentathlon.
Healy became the first Irish woman to win gold in any European Indoor event, English took his 800m championship medal tally to five, and O’Connor saved her best until last in the five-event pentathlon, winning the 800m outright to move from fourth to third.
[ Kate O’Connor wins Irish Times/Sport Ireland Sportswoman of the Year for 2025Opens in new window ]
The outdoor season was already under way by mid-March at the European Throwing Cup in Nicosia, Cyprus, where Tuthill won gold in the under-23 hammer, a first Irish title at that event which has been running since 2001. Anna Gavigan also won silver in the women’s under-23 discus and Oisín Joyce won bronze in the under-23 javelin.
Then just 12 days after Apeldoorn – and some 5,300 miles away – O’Connor went to the World Indoor Championships in China and improved her podium position again, winning pentathlon silver and the first medal for Ireland at those championships in 19 years.
There was another first for Efrem Gidey when he won gold at the European 10,000m Cup at the end of May, the first Irish athlete to stand on that podium.
Strictly speaking the US NCAA Championships isn’t an international event, although such is the level of competition it may as well be. So, although not part of the 25 medals, another special mention here to Sophie O’Sullivan, who won the women’s 1,500m title at Hayward Field in Oregon in June, becoming only the fifth Irish woman to win an NCAA title, following in the strides of her mother Sonia, who won the 3,000m with Villanova in 1990 and 1991.
Medal expectations were high going into the European Under-23 Championships in Norway in July, given Irish athletes had done well in recent years. And five medals were delivered by four different athletes, starting with Thompson (gold in the 10,000m, bronze in the 5,000m), Griggs (silver in the 5,000m), Tuthill (silver in the hammer) and then Eimear Maher (bronze in the 1,500m).
The European Youth Olympics is, for many, the entry-level on the international stage, Rhasidat Adeleke among those to make an early mark here when winning a sprint double back in 2019. Four Irish medals were won in Skopje in July with Erin Friel and Ben Sykes bringing home bronze in the 400m and 100m respectively, before Ellis McHugh and Joe Burke also won bronze in the 400m hurdles and 200m respectively.
Two more medals arrived at the World University Games in the Germany when O’Connor won heptathlon gold. That was only the fifth gold medal won by an Irish athlete at this level, which started with Ronnie Delany winning gold over 800m in 1961. Tuthill then continued her rich vein of form to win another silver in the hammer.
At the European Under-20 Championships in Finland in August, Conor Kelly produced the best run of his young life to win 400m gold by over half a second, running 45.83 just a month after turning 18.
To Tokyo in September, where O’Connor set personal bests in five of the seven events to win heptathlon silver, becoming just the sixth Irish athlete to win a World Championship medal outdoors. No lack of drama here either, as O’Connor ran through a knee injury in her final event, the 800m, to once again raise her Irish heptathlon record to 6,714.
Then wrapping it all up just in time for Christmas, four Irish medals were won at the European Cross-Country in Lagoa, Portugal, starting with bronze for Emma Hickey in the women’s under-20 race, a first by any Irish woman at that level, the 16-year-old from Wexford among the youngest runners on the day.
Five days shy of 21, Nick Griggs ended his streak of runner-up positions to win under-23 gold, the first individual title by any Irishman in the European Cross-Country, and with that also leading the team to gold. In the last race of the day, the Irish senior men also won team silver, guided home by Jack O’Leary in fifth, earning a podium place in that race for the first time in 25 years.
Many of these medal winners are already looking ahead to another World Indoor Championships in Poland next March and the European Championships in Birmingham next August. Roll on 2026, you’ve a hard act to follow.
