Matt Hudson-Smith won European gold in his home stadium – so why weren’t more fans there to see it?

On the day of the men’s 400m final at the European Championships, Matt Hudson-Smith sent a text to the coach who first got him into athletics.“Enjoy the show,” he told Sharon Morris, promising fireworks as he hunted for a third continental crown. Hudson-Smith, now 31, was only nine when he first stepped onto a track. Morris, a coach with Birchfield Harriers in Birmingham, England, watched on as he ran those first few laps as a junior.And here he was, all those years later — not just on home soil but at his home stadium — in Birmingham, running one more lap. He duly delivered a golden 400m at the Alexander Stadium, a track where one of the stands is named after him.It meant replicating the feat he achieved in 2018 and 2022, making Hudson-Smith the first European sprinter with a hat-trick of 400m golds, and the first man to win this event in their own country since Germany’s Ingo Schulz at the 2002 edition in Munich.Hudson-Smith’s 44.17s winning time was two hundredths outside the championship record of two years ago, and well clear of the other medallists: France’s Muhammad Abdallah Kounta (44.40s, silver) and Jonas Phijffers (44.41s, bronze).He shot out of the blocks, splitting 10.90s and 20.86s at 100m and 200m, which had him half a second clear at halfway. Those same tactics backfired in the semi-final, when, in Hudson-Smith’s own words, he “switched off,” and Phijffers ran him down on the home straight.Not in the final. The Briton, an Olympic silver medallist and sixth fastest of all-time at this distance, held his nerve and form in the outside lane. “The whole plan was to get out (fast). I knew when I got to 350m that I had it,” he told reporters in the mixed zone. Even as others came back, the gap was too big to close.“I sealed, probably my last European championships, in style,” he beamed. “Doing it in my home town, in front of my stand, my friends, family…I’m trying to not cry,” he said, his native Birmingham twang breaking with emotion. “That meant the world. I’ve trained here, I know how to run on this track. It was going to take one hell of an effort for anyone to beat me.”