Katharine Merry will front the ’s coverage as the European Athletics Championships begin at Birmingham’s Alexander Stadium from 10-16 August. Great Britain are chasing top spot in the medal table, and the scale is wider than a home meeting: 49 nations are contesting 50 gold medals.
Birmingham and 50 gold medals
The mixed 4x100m relay is in the programme for the first time, lifting the medal count and changing the shape of the week’s finals. That adds another route to the podium for teams that can assemble four fast legs across sprint disciplines, and it gives Great Britain one more medal event to target while the championships are staged in Great Britain for the first time.
There are 10 world champions and seven Olympic champions in the line-up, so this is not a light-field domestic build-up. The field also includes athletes from Sweden, Norway, Greece, Italy, Ukraine, the Netherlands and Swiss, which is why the medal table battle matters across the full eight-day programme.
One to YouTube
The will spread coverage across One, Two, iPlayer, Radio 5 Live, the Sport website, the Sport app and Sport social media channels including YouTube. That range matters for a week with finals stacked across different sessions, because it gives viewers and listeners multiple ways to follow the event rather than forcing everything into one broadcast slot.
Britain’s headline names are already set. Keely Hodgkinson is the reigning women's 800m champion, Dina Asher-Smith, Matthew Hudson-Smith, Katarina Johnson-Thompson, Georgia Hunter Bell and Jake Wightman are all part of the home interest, and Amy Hunt has already won the women’s 100m on Monday and the 200m on Thursday.
Hodgkinson and Hunt
The sharpest race inside the meet is the women's 800m. Audrey Werro beat Keely Hodgkinson in June, but Hodgkinson was the fastest of the three in the semi-finals, while Audrey Werro fell in her semi-final, finished eighth after clipping her own leg and landing heavily, and was put through to Friday’s final on appeal.
Amy Hunt’s week has its own run of pressure points. She is aiming to win the women’s 4x100m relay on Saturday and the mixed 4x100m relay on Sunday, with a target of four gold medals at these championships. For Great Britain, that is the practical measure now: whether the home team turns the Alexander Stadium advantage into enough finals points to stay on top of the table, and whether Hodgkinson can add a third successive European 800m title on Friday evening.
