Athletics, Italy finishes first in the medal table at the European Championships in Birmingham

The twenty-seventh edition of the European Athletics Championships was held from August 10 to 16, 2026 at the Alexander Stadium in Birmingham, with fifty events on the programme. It is the first time a British city has hosted the continental championship, as noted by the Birmingham City Council, which together with the organising committee had defined the route for the road events.

According to end-of-event reports, Italy finished first in the medal table with 10 gold, 6 silver and 6 bronze, for a total of 22 medals: the second consecutive first place, following that of the previous edition (final medal table).

	Gold	Total medals
Birmingham 2026	10	22
Previous edition	11	24

The comparison deserves a non-triumphalist reading: compared with the previous edition, which closed with 11 gold and 24 medals overall, the Italian haul is slightly lower. First place was retained, output was not. In a continental medal table, the difference between ten and eleven gold medals often comes down to hundredths of a second or a single failed jump, which is why the figure should be read as confirmation of the movement’s solidity, not as progress.

Thirty-three hundredths among three teams

The event that closed the track programme is also the one that sums up the level of competition at the championships. Italy won the men’s 4x400 metres relay in 2:59.16, ahead of Great Britain in 2:59.19 and the Netherlands in 2:59.49, according to official European Athletics results reported by Olympics.com.

Three hundredths separate gold and silver; thirty-three separate gold from bronze. All three teams went under three minutes — a threshold that is not routine at continental level — and Great Britain lost on home soil, in front of their own crowd, by a fraction of a second.

The vault and the usual measure

Outside the national medal count, the most cited result of the championships is that of the men’s pole vault, won by Armand Duplantis with 6.15 metres. It is a measure the Swedish vaulter regularly clears on the international circuit, and one that at the Europeans was only needed to win: the competition, in effect, was decided well before the final bar.

The city as stadium

The organisers moved part of the programme onto the streets: the half marathon, the race walk marathon and the marathon were held in the city centre on August 15 and 16. It is the format that major championships now adopt as standard practice to take athletics outside the stadium and turn the endurance events into a city event, with road closures as the trade-off.

The next benchmark for the Italian movement is not the continental medal table, but the confirmation of the same results in a world context, where the field of opponents changes: in the 4x400, the time that earned gold in Birmingham was 2:59.16.