Ireland’s Andrew Coscoran celebrates with supporters after receiving his bronze medal. Pic: INPHO/Morgan Treacy
Save for Mark English, every Irish medal that floated through the mixed zone was already shifting focus up the road. No standing still. No interest in standing still.
If Kate O’Connor is the enemy of underperformance, then the mentality of this podium-climbing generation that she’s at the head of is the enemy of one-off, isolated performance.
English’s desire to stand square in the moment on Thursday night was utterly understandable. The 33-year-old was 13 years chasing gold. 13 years chasing a career-crowning two-lap moment.
The 6am Friday flight to Sierra Nevada for a stint of altitude training was not boarded. There were celebrations to be drunk. Tomorrow, and whatever tomorrow holds, can wait.
With Europe finally conquered, a Diamond League win on the books, and 1.43 broken, the global championship stage is the obvious next turn. He has never advanced to a World or Olympic final. Six semi-final exits is his near miss roll call.
Come LA, he’ll be 35. LA got no airtime in Birmingham.
“I have to just process this gold medal tonight and I’ll make a decision on that in the future,” he replied when asked about sustaining his career for another two summers.
Birmingham is the midpoint of the LA cycle. Birmingham is a springboard to LA. Medal here and you can mix it there. Prominent here and you can perform there.
The Brum barometer is not to be discounted when eyeing up the deeper fields ahead. From a green perspective, the reading of the past week was most encouraging. The past week broke new ground for the number of individual European Championship medals it delivered.
English accounted, we’ll shortly arrive at his fellow podium climbers.
Nicola Tuthill was fifth in the hammer. A career-best placing. At 22, she is still a child in hammer years. At 22, she is already contending in an event for which Europe’s cage is the epicentre.
Free of injury, Farranfore’s David Kenny was sixth in the race-walk half-marathon. Another discipline where Europe so often dictates the standard.
The half-marathon distance will make its Olympic debut in LA. No sooner had Kenny described Saturday’s performance as a “massive step forward” when the 27-year-old was articulating out loud his goal of shaving a full minute off his 1:24.49 national record.
For the first time in Irish athletics history, both 4x100m relay teams secured a European final lane. The women posted a national record in doing so. The average age of the Sleeman-Neville-Leahy-Roy quartet is 25. Three of the men’s quartet are 25 or younger. All four men from the new-look 4x400m relay are 25 or younger. Their 3:01.76 went third on the Irish all-time list.
