GLASGOW, July 31 -- The last time Northern Ireland won an athletics gold medal at the Commonwealth Games, the Berlin Wall was still standing. On Thursday at Hampden Park, Kate O'Connor made that wait feel not just finished but forgotten.

O'Connor, 27, won the women's heptathlon at the Glasgow 2026 Commonwealth Games with a score of 6,569 points, ending a drought stretching back more than four decades with a performance that was authoritative across two full days of seven-event competition. She had won silver in Birmingham four years ago. In Scotland, on home soil for a Games she had quietly circled for the better part of a year, she stepped forward.

"It's just about holding my nerve," O'Connor said after the final event, with the kind o...