By: Elizabeth Egan
Published on: Dec 31, 2025
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What a year 2025 has been for the field and multi-event athletes, with four international championship medals for Kate O'Connor, a world hammer final for Nicola Tuthill, new national records, breakthrough moments, and all-round momentum across many of the events.
Here’s a quick summary of the highlights from Irish field and multi events over the past year, along with what we might expect to see from these athletes in the season ahead.
Kate O'Connor started just six competitions in 2025. She set a new national indoor pentathlon in the first and won a World Championships silver medal and broke the National Heptathlon record in the last. In the intervening months she also picked up European Indoor bronze, World Indoor silver, the World University Games title, and broke the pentathlon and heptathlon records each on one other occasion.
Over the years, O’Connor has added 899 points to the national heptathlon record, and set new personal bests in every heptathlon and pentathlon discipline in 2025.
She ended 2025 as the second best in the world both by ranking (World Rankings) and performance (Top list). With World Indoor Championships, Commonwealth Games and European Championships all on the calendar, 2026 again provides multiple medal opportunities.
Long before Tokyo places were confirmed, Nicola Tuthill had already had what can only be described as a successful season. After consecutive silver medals in 2023 and 2024, she finally won gold at the European Throwing Cup in Cyprus in March.
She then picked up silver at the European U23 Championships in Norway and the World University Games in Germany. She added 1.39 metres to her own national U23 record on 11th June and a further 4 cm at the National Senior Championships – where she took her fourth title – on 3 August.
But the icing on the cake came in Tokyo in September when, at 21-years-old, she made the World final.
Oisín Joyce finished 2024 with a bronze medal in the Javelin at the World U20 Championships and started 2025 with a bronze medal in the U23 Javelin at the European Throwing Cup in March, throwing just 3cm short of the PB he set in Peru.
Despite injury halting his season before it really got going, Ireland wasn’t without an emerging javelin talent. Twenty-three-year-old Conor Cusack improved his best to 75.42m and elevated himself to third on the Irish all-time list.
While Terry McHugh’s Irish record is still some way off, Cusack and Joyce have the potential to ensure that the glory days of Irish javelin throwing are not all in the past.
Ramona in Oklahoma is known as the place to go if you want to lob a discus a very long way. Niamh Fogarty made her first trip to the renowned venue early in 2025. After a few 55-56 metre results there, she finally got the hang of the wind assistance provided. On 27 April she launched the 2km implement out to 58.40m, adding 80cm to Patricia Walsh’s national record from 1984.
Fogarty won her seventh national discus title and her first in the shot put in August, after earning valuable points for Ireland in both events at the European Team Championships in June.
Reece Ademola has long been considered one of Ireland’s top field event talents, and 7.97m in September 2023 hinted at what the future might hold. Injury intervened in 2024, however, and Ademola spent months recovering from surgery before making a return to competition in July this year.
Then in Santry in August, he jumped 8.00m (+2.6m/s) to take the Irish Senior title. Both that, and the wind-legal 7.93m (+1.6m/s) he produced that day, suggest that he is back to his best, and will have headed into the winter full of confidence. Irish record holder Ciaran McDonagh is the only other Irish athlete to have ever jumped eight metres in any conditions.
Kate wasn’t the only O’Connor breaking national multievent records in 2025. Twenty-three-year-old Diarmuid O'Connor – who finished fourth in the Decathlon at the European U20 Championships in 2021 – finally began to give some indication of what he’s capable of as a senior in 2024.
After a promising performance in December last year, he collected 5594 points at the Big East Conference Championships in February, adding 34 points to Joe Naughton’s National Heptathlon record. That record had been back in 2002, two months before O’Connor was born.
Eric Favors has been a staple name on the Irish teamsheet at major championships since 2022, having made it to two World Championships, two European Championships and an Olympic Games since then.
Despite spending most of the summer sitting in a quota spot for Tokyo, he left it very late, however, to achieve the required Athletics Ireland B standard (20.40) this time around. That he did on 8 August with a throw of 20.48. With his World Championship spot secured, Favors improved his season’s best to 20.75 on 21 August, the second furthest throw ever by an Irish man.
Anna Gavigan won silver in the U23 Discus at the European Throwing Cup in Cyprus. She finished eighth at the European U23 Championships in Bergen and improved her personal best to 54.20m, a distance that only three Irish women have ever exceeded, when taking the national U23 title in Tullamore.
With four metres separating them at their best, Fogarty is still the clear number one in Ireland, but she’ll need to bring her A game every time the two meet if she wishes to stay on top. Could a rivalry between these two take Irish women’s discus throwing to a world class level?
While none of them are throwing senior implements just yet, it’s exciting to see Cian Crampton, Thomas Williams and Theo Hanlon emerging in the throws. Crampton launched the 1.75kg discus to 58.32 in Loughborough in June, to break the Irish U20 record for the second time. He finished 6th at the European U20 Championships.
A personal best of 18.00 for the 6kg shot put in the qualifiers earned Hanlon a place in the European U20 final. Williams, the 2024 European U18 Hammer Champion, finished fourth at the European Youth Olympic Festival.
Ruby Millet looks set to make a return in the long jump in 2025, where 2023 European U20 champion Elizabeth Ndudi already possesses world-class potential. Aoife O'Sullivan had a breakthrough year in the high jump.
Saragh Buggy received her first national championship defeat in a decade this year at the hands of Greek-national and Irish-resident Daphni Doulaptsi-Teeuwen, who exceeded 13 metres for the first time this summer. Might this competition give the St. Abban’s athlete fresh motivation in the year ahead?
Not all Irish field events contain international standard athletes at the moment, but it feels that more do than ever before. And even those which don’t, continue to provide intriguing and exciting battles on a national stage.
A rising tide lifts all boats, and with Irish athletics in rude health at the moment, the field eventers are determined not to be left behind.
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