The European Athletics Championships took place in Birmingham in August 2026 and coming so soon after the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow, it has been quite the summer for British athletics. With Josh Kerr also smashing the long-standing world record for the mile at the London Diamond League meeting in July, it has been a real feast for fans of track and field.
Some questioned whether you can have too much of a good thing, and suggested that the pricing of tickets for the week of action in Birmingham hadn’t helped either. Organisers said they were happy with the attendance for the Europeans, despite there being around 9,000 empty seats for the first session.
In the final analysis the total attendance for the Championships was well over 200,000, the local council stating that they had “surpassed targets set by event organisers”. However the event is viewed from an administrative and commercial angle, on the track we saw history made.
There were a host of records set and momentous moments, but many of the 218,000 people will have seen Amy Hunt at some point, and the Newark-born sprinter was the undoubted queen of the Championships. The Cambridge graduate made history in Birmingham by becoming the first athlete to win four golds at a single European Championships.
Her confidence and charisma have attracted a lot of attention and she made it clear she was targeting all four golds. In her quest to make history she set out to win the 100m, 200m, 4 x 100m relay and the new event, the 4 x 100m relay mixed race. She delivered the goods and in some style, proving once again that you can combine being an “academic badass and a track goddess”, as she said after claiming a silver medal at the 2025 Worlds in Tokyo.
Four Events, Four Golds
⭐ FOUR GOLDS FROM FOUR FOR AMY HUNT 🥇🥇🥇🥇
She’s the first athlete in history to win four European gold medals at the same championships 🔥 pic.twitter.com/RugoKaVR0l
— BBC Sport (@BBCSport) August 16, 2026
Hunt started her athletics life as a 200m runner and it quickly became apparent she was immensely talented. Back in 2019, when just 17 years old, she broke the world U18 record over that distance in a time that was faster than Dina Asher-Smith’s mark for the British under-20 record.
Having taken that silver medal in Tokyo, a result that really announced her return on the big stage, she was strongly fancied to win gold in Birmingham in the 200m. In the final Asher-Smith ran her close, although she pulled away from her teammate and Irish athlete Rhasidat Adeleke, who took silver, winning in a time of 22.19 seconds, a European lead.
Three days prior to that she had claimed her first solo gold at a major championships in the 100m. Again it was a battle, but she clocked 11 seconds on the nose, with just 0.12 seconds separating first and seventh. Asher-Smith ran a season’s best but was down in fifth in a time of 11.10 seconds.
She then moved on to the team events and barring issues with the baton, this was expected to be the easier half of the quadruple-gold attempt. With Asher-Smith now a colleague, not a rival, the four British athletes set a European lead of 42.05 seconds in the final. It was enough to blow Switzerland and all the rest out of the water, and Amy had her hat-trick.
In winning three golds she matched the achievement of Asher-Smith (and others). Her sprint partner had won the same three events at the 2018 Europeans in Berlin. That was described at the time as “better than anything I’ve seen in my time at UK Athletics” by Neil Black, the former performance director of UK Athletics. Dina may well have won the mixed 4 x 100m had it existed back then but even so, that shows just how special Hunt’s quadruple is.
Moving on to that last gold, Hunt was again running with, not against, Asher-Smith. The duo, who boast a degree in English (Hunt) and one in History (Asher-Smith wrote a dissertation on how jazz music affected social integration), teamed up with Jeremiah Azu and Zharnel Hughes. They saw off the challenge of Germany and Spain to complete Hunt’s four-gold haul.
Asher-Smith Makes History Too
Hunt rightly attracted most of the attention but her fellow academic/athletic badass, Asher-Smith, also made history in Birmingham. It was an exceptional Championships for Team GB, with Italy just pipping them to top spot in the medals table. Hunt and co. finished second though, thanks to nine golds, eight silvers and two bronze medals.
While Hunt had the best event ever with four goals, her teammate’s haul of two golds and a bronze made her the most successful athlete in the entire history of the European Championships. Asher-Smith won her first gold in Amsterdam in 2016, in the 200m. After Birmingham her amazing haul stands at eight golds, two silvers and a bronze.
Birmingham was the 27th edition of this event, the first having taken place in 1934. In 92 years of European athletics, nobody, male or female, can match Asher-Smith’s amazing tally of medals. She is 30 now so could yet add to that in Poland (Chorzow) in 2028. That said, if Hunt lands another clean sweep in two years’ time, Asher-Smith’s record might not make it past 2030!