British athletics: end-of-term report – Athletics Weekly

Are the GB & NI team’s modest results at the World Champs cause for concern? Tokyo aside, some interesting clues can be found in UK Athletics’ own stats website.

After the British athletics team finished 21st on the 2025 World Champs medals table and failed to win a gold medal for the first time since Paris in 2003, is this a worrying sign of decline or merely a blip in an otherwise upward trajectory?

As with most statistics, you can make an argument either way. Critics can point to the fact Botswana, Tanzania and Ecuador finished above Britain in the medals table. But more positive and optimistic fans will say that Britain finishing fourth equal in the points table with Germany on 66 points (with points awarded from first down to eighth place) behind only Jamaica (98), Kenya (118) and the United States (308).

Britain wasn’t the only nation to endure a frustrating championship in Tokyo either. The Brits won three silver and two bronze medals but Ethiopia only won four minor medals just three years after topping the medals table at the World Indoor Champs.

What’s more, Poland won one solitary silver medal. Germany, an athletics superpower of similar standing to Britain over the years, won the same number of medals as Britain but with one difference, they captured an all-important gold courtesy of Leo Neugebauer in the decathlon.

As Max Jones, the former UKA head coach at the turn of the millennium, was fond of saying: “A gold medal a day keeps the press away.”

Malcolm Arnold, the British head coach at the 1996 Olympics, discovered this in painful fashion when his team were criticised for winning six medals, crucially none of which were gold, at the Atlanta Games.

Dave Collins, the UKA performance director from 2005-2008, was put under similar pressure and left his role amid severe criticism after being lambasted for modest World Championship medal tallies in Helsinki and Osaka (see the table below) plus a disappointing European Champs performance in Gothenburg in 2006 where Britain won only one gold and 10 minor medals.

Britain won one gold and eight medals in total at the 2008 Olympics in Beijing as well, which on the face of it doesn’t seem too bad, but with a home Olympics in London fast approaching it wasn’t deemed good enough – and Collins was replaced by Charles van Commenee. The results of GB teams during Collins’ reign have improved over time, however, due to the knowledge that, among other things, Russians…