This is the golden age — Ireland has never had a World Championships like this

Ireland's Kate O'Connor with her women's heptathlon silver medal at the World Athletics Championships at Kabukicho in Tokyo, Japan. Picture: Sam Barnes/Sportsfile

Ireland had never had a World Championships quite like this. Not even close. 

Granted, they had won gold on this stage before — via Sonia O’Sullivan, Eamonn Coghlan, Rob Heffernan and Olive Loughnane — but track their overall impact at those respective editions and you quickly realise something about Irish athletics: The golden age is now.

What the 28-strong team did at the Japan National Stadium was simply exceptional. That’s not hyperbole or looking at things through any green-tinted lens. There’s no other way to frame this. They went with a strong, solid team and vastly outperformed expectations.

Across 19 previous editions of the World Championships, spanning 42 years, Ireland had never had so many athletes making an impact, and they did it from the track to the field to the roads — from 21-year-old Nicola Tuthill to 40-year-old Fionnuala McCormack.

It’s not usually like this. 

There have been many times over the past decade when Ireland became something of an irrelevance on a stage this grand, either showing up without the true firepower to make an impact or else failing to deliver what they could when it mattered most.

London 2017 was just eight years ago, but in some ways it feels like a distant universe. Line that championship up alongside this one and you quickly see the distance Irish athletics has made up on the world’s best.

First, the quantity: Ireland sent just 12 athletes to London. 

They sent 28 to Tokyo. But, perhaps more important, the quality: In London they had just one top-12 finish — Rob Heffernan finishing eighth in the 50km race walk. In Tokyo, they had seven: Sarah Healy; Cian McPhillips; Andrew Coscoran; Kate O’Connor; Nicola Tuthill; Fionnuala McCormack; and the mixed 4x400m relay.

Medals are great things, but they can be an unreliable metric to take a proper health check on the state of Irish athletics. Using them for the Euro Indoors or Euro Cross is fair enough, but at world level it’s often misleading — papering over the cracks when one superstar talent hides poor depth or, in the absence of a medal, sometimes painting an unnecessarily dark picture despite a rising performance tide.

But back to London for a second: Because that was a dire showing. 

There were some extenuating circumstances — Ciara Mageean wasn’t herself as she got knocked out in the 1500m heats and Thomas Barr came down with gastroenteritis ahead of his semi-final. But even with those accounted for, Ireland was still so far off the pace.

But not anymore. They went to Tokyo with one realistic medal hopeful, Kate O’Connor, but even that was an outside shot — the Dundalk athlete going in ranked fifth and rising above herself in spectacular fashion, setting lifetime bests in five of seven events.

After a year in which she’d already won three major medals and pushed her performances into a new stratosphere, to do that again here, where it mattered most, spoke of an athlete whose remarkable talent is twinned with a rare and precious ability to extract the very best out of herself in key moments.

Then there’s Cian McPhillips, who no one — not even himself and his coach Joe Ryan — expected to come up just one fifth of a second shy of a medal. As annoying as his fourth-place finish was, it was a seismic performance, his time the 16th quickest in history. Never again will he enter a race as an unknown quantity.

Even if they’d been absent, this would have been a strong World Championships for Ireland, with Sarah Healy and Andrew Coscoran both making 1500m finals — something that had never happened at world or Olympic level. Fionnuala McCormack smashed it out of the park in the women’s marathon, slicing through the field to a ninth-place finish.

Nicola Tuthill making the hammer final at just 21 was a whopping achievement, and the Bandon athlete looks cut from the very same cloth as O’Connor — a gifted, humble, hardworking athlete with world-beating potential and an ambition to match.

Peter Lynch had a fantastic run to get 24th in the men’s marathon, while Sarah Lavin was 13th in the 100m hurdles — not what she wanted, but that alone is a measure of her class. 

Mark English ran probably the best race of his career to finish third in the 800m semi-final and was beaten only by two of the eventual medallists. A better draw and he could have joined McPhillips in the final. 

Sharlene Mawdsley performed admirably after a tough summer, while Darragh McElhinney — in missing the 5000m final by just half a second — showed he very much belongs at this level.

There was the usual raft of under-performances, too. Both the 4x400m relays were below par, the women especially — trailing home eighth in their heat and almost 10 seconds down on the national record. Eric Favors again was way off his season’s best in the shot put. 

Sophie O’Sullivan turned in a brilliant showing to make the 1500m semi-finals but her injury-hit preparations found her out in a big way once she got there, while Cathal Doyle was also coming in below par — knocked out in the 1500m heats after suffering an ill-timed injury in recent weeks.

On the whole, though, there was no way to look at it as anything other than a screaming success. Less than three years out from the Los Angeles Olympics, Ireland now has a significant presence at the sport’s top table. 

That’s a great place to be.