One more point: a decade of club glory at the Irish cross-country nationals

On a mucky day in Gowran in 2023, Kilkenny City Harriers (KCH) and North Belfast Harriers (NBH) finished the senior men’s national race on exactly the same score: 72 points each. The title went to Kilkenny on countback.

That is cross-country. While our more well-adjusted friends and family retreat indoors until at least St Patrick’s Day, we gear up to run laps of a muddy field in the wind and rain. It is neither very fast nor very far (unless you’re a 1500m runner, in which case it’s very far, and congratulations/commiserations). So why do we do it?

Not, mainly, to see how we stack up against our friends, rivals and fellow lunatics. The real draw is the club: the people you train with every week, maybe the people you grew up across the road from. Running is one of the most individual sports there is, but for one day every November it becomes about something bigger, and people go to see God up the home straight to salvage one more point.

So who are these clubs? Across the nine championships from 2016 to 2025 (no race in 2020), two stories run side by side. The first is dominance: a handful of clubs, led by the Leevale women, have taken a huge share of the medals. The second is churn. Raheny’s men won the first three titles of the decade and haven’t finished in the top five since 2019, while Candour (CNDR Track) first appeared in the results in 2024 and have won both times since. Success at the top is concentrated, and it is rarely permanent.

Who ruled: one dynasty, one relay

No club has dominated like the Leevale women. They have won five of the nine titles and were off the podium in only two years, 2022 and 2023. Three of those wins came consecutively, between 2017 and 2019, and after wins in 2024 and 2025 they are chasing a second threepeat. But the gap in their reign is as revealing as the reign itself: in the two years Leevale slipped to fourth and fifth, Dublin City Harriers (DCH) won both titles.

The rest of the women’s titles are shared out thinly: two for DCH, and one each for Dundrum South Dublin (DSD) in 2016 and Letterkenny in 2021.

The men’s side is less a dynasty than a relay. Raheny Shamrock won the first three titles of the decade, 2016 to 2018. Then came a scramble in which Clonliffe Harriers (2019, 2022), DSD (2021) and Kilkenny (2023) each took a turn, until Candour arrived in 2024 and won again in 2025. Clonliffe are the constant through all of it: six podium finishes in seven championships since 2018, two wins and four medals, more than any other men’s club. They are still one win behind Raheny’s three.

This is a concentrated sport on both sides. Fifteen of the 27 women’s medals handed out over the period went to just three clubs (Leevale, DCH and Letterkenny), and the top three men’s clubs (Clonliffe, Raheny and DSD) took 13 of 27. Of the 58 clubs that have had scoring teams at the nationals in the last decade, only eleven men’s teams and eleven women’s teams have come home with a medal. And the near-misses sting: the DSD women have finished fourth three times (2018, 2024 and 2025), while on the men’s side Donore, Kilkenny and Mullingar have each been fourth twice.

Strength in one gender doesn’t often carry over to the other. Most medal-winning clubs have won in only one race, and only Leevale and DSD have won multiple medals on both sides. Only three times has a club taken men’s and women’s medals on the same day: Leevale in 2016 and 2021, and DSD in 2017.

Score the men’s and women’s teams together, though, and the picture changes. If medals went to the best all-round club, DSD would lead with four titles, followed by Clonliffe and Leevale with two each. By that measure, the most complete club in Irish cross-country over the decade is not the one with the most trophies.

What winning takes

Not every medal is created equal. Over the nine races the average winning team scored 51 points in the men’s race and 67 in the women’s, while the average bronze medal took 100 and 112. But the averages hide some wild swings.

DSD’s 22 points in 2021 is the lowest winning score on the men’s side, and they beat Clonliffe by 65 points, the biggest margin of the decade. A year later Clonliffe themselves won with 86, the highest winning total in the men’s results. The women’s range runs from Leevale’s 35 in 2017 to Leevale’s 120 in 2019, a winning score that was worse than the average bronze medal.

And then there are the finishes that stay with you: the dead heat in Gowran, and the 2022 women’s race, when DCH beat Letterkenny by a single point. Women’s races are generally the tighter ones. The biggest gap between gold and silver in the women’s results was 30 points (DSD over Leevale in 2016), less than half the men’s biggest.

Who rose, who fell

Zoom out from the podium and the churn is hard to miss. Broadly, clubs fall into four categories: the established powers, the climbers, the fallen giants and the one-hit wonders.

The established powers. On the men’s side, Clonliffe are the benchmark. On the women’s side, DSD have never finished lower than fifth in the seven years they fielded a team, and DCH have been fourth or better every year since 2021. Letterkenny are the part-timers’ champions: they have fielded a team in only five of the nine years, but when they turn up they win medals, with a worst finish of fourth and a title in 2021.

The climbers. Mullingar’s men were 10th in 2019, third in 2022 and second in 2025, and the “Mullingar mafia” now has its eyes on the top step. NBH went from eighth in 2018 to second in both 2023 and 2024 before slipping back to sixth. Among the women, Tullamore rose from 12th in 2016 to a bronze medal in 2023. And then, of course, there is Candour, who have won both times they’ve lined up.

The fallen giants. Raheny’s men are the starkest case: three wins to open the decade, a bronze in 2019 and then 10th, 14th, sixth, 16th and eighth. Donore finished fourth twice (2017 and 2021) and were 13th in 2025. Rathfarnham went from fifth in 2016 and 2021 to 18th in 2024. Leevale’s men took medals in 2016 and 2021, but were 13th in 2023 and don’t field a team in 2024 or 2025. The irony for Raheny is that their women went the other way, from 11th in 2016 to a bronze in 2021.

The one-hit wonders. Clonmel were third in 2018, City of Derry fourth and North Cork fifth in 2019, East Cork second in 2022. On the women’s side, UCD took bronze in 2022 and Finn Valley silver in 2025, their only appearance in the top-five table. None of them have been able to sustain it, but it is a reminder that at nationals a good day is always possible.

One statistic deserves an asterisk. Only two clubs have won a medal every time they fielded a team: the Candour men and the An Riocht women. But each has appeared in the results just twice, Candour for two wins and An Riocht for two bronzes in 2016 and 2017.

What’s next

So what lasts? Perhaps the Leevale women, and almost nothing else. Raheny won three in a row and then vanished from the top five. Candour went from absent to unbeaten. Clubs that were in the top five a few years ago are now 13th or 18th. No club should take its place at the top for granted, and none should write itself off, either: Clonmel, East Cork, UCD and Finn Valley have all had their day among the medals.

The next championships take place in Abbotstown on 22 November. Can the men of the Mullingar mafia finally topple Candour? Can anyone stop the Leevale ladies going for another threepeat? Can Donore or Raheny return to greatness? And what about the individuals? Come back next time to find out.

Whoever wins, somewhere in that field there will be someone fighting up the home straight for one more point, for people they’ve known all their lives. That is the whole point.