Years ago, on a June evening at the New River Stadium in London, I asked British 200 metres specialist John Regis, who later that summer would add a World Championships silver medal to his European gold, why he had given up a promising career as a youth footballer with Arsenal in favour of the track.

Regis, whose cousin Cyrille Regis was a prolific striker for West Bromwich Albion, Coventry City and England, said, effectively, it used to drive him mad that he could do everything right but a team-mate’s mistake could lose a match.

While as an athlete he could control his own performance.

That said - one of the high points of Regis’s career came as part of a team…

A year before that peak performance, at the 1990 European Championships in Split, he had won a complete set of sprint medals - 200m gold, 4x100m silver and 100m bronze.

So far so normal. But Regis had also been talked into running for Britain’s 4x400m relay team and contributed a sub-45sec split time in adding a second gold to his Split tally.

At that point, whether he liked it or not, his card was marked for a key role in the British men’s 4x400m team at the 1991 World Championships in Tokyo.

He played a key part in the victory over the Olympic and defending champions United States, getting the baton from Derek Redmond and handing over to Kriss Akabusi, switched late to the anchor leg after the decision was taken to run individual silver medallist Roger Black on the first leg to get a lead and shake the Americans up.

Akabusi, by then a 400m hurdles specialist, was close enough to individual champion Antonio Pettigrew to track him to the final bend before making his decisive and glorious move.

In his autobiography,  Black reflected: "As I stood behind the line ready to lead off I wasn’t running for Great Britain. I wasn’t running for me. I was running for Kriss and Derek and John. That is the secret.

"That is what the 4x400 have that I believe the 4x100 have never had. John Regis would admit that. He would often say he felt that sense of belonging which is the essence of the British 4x400m squad."

Akabusi, an engaging and effervescent character who appears regularly on television, has for many years imparted the lessons of that memorable team effort as motivational speaker.

He knows all about the potency of team motivation because of the shift he made in his career from a flat 400m runner to a 400m hurdler who won European and Commonwealth gold and Olympic bronze, as well as setting British record of 47.93sec to break the mark of 48.12 set by David Hemery in winning the 1968 Olympic title in Mexico City, later lowering it to 47.82, which still stands.

For whatever reason, Akabusi’s event often used to be the first one in the European Cup, the athletics team championships that had begun as the Bruno Zauli Cup in 1965 and which was a biennial event until 1993, after which it was held annually.

It was his opening win at the 1989 European Cup in Gateshead that stirred the spirits of the home athletes to the point where they became the first nation to win the event other than the Soviet Union or East Germany.

Akabusi’s opening flourish saw him come extravagantly home ahead of West Germany’s Olympic bronze medallist and world silver medallist Harald Schmid and many of his victorious team-mates were quoted on the lift that gave to their own preparation and performance.

But the point about this event - which changed identity to the European Athletics Team Championships in 2009 - is that every point counts. So while eight-point winning bonanzas are clearly good news, gritty performances from less elevated performers can feel just as valuable.

This is one of the unique aspects of an event that is about to have its first incarnation within the European Games, the third edition of which is due to start in Kraków-Malopolska next week.

While Akabusi victories came to be expected as the years went by, motivation for the British team received peak stimulation from victories by unheralded performers - such as Robert Hough.

At the 1997 European Cup in Munich’s Olympic Stadium a British men’s team that had performed underwhelmingly at the previous year’s Olympics in Atlanta recovered its pride by winning the trophy for the first time since 1989.

While Linford Christie, Jonathan Edwards, Black and Steve Backley all delivered the expected maximum points, the vital bonuses which enabled them to finish 13 points clear of the host nation came from the likes of Robert Weir, second in the discus, Mark Sesay, third in the 800m on his international debut, and, most unexpectedly, Hough in the men’s 3,000m steeplechase.

Hough, 25, was entitled to feel more at home in Munich than many of his team-mates having studied German at Sheffield University: But he let his feet do the talking as he produced an inspired performance, arriving at the final hurdle as joint leader and taking it like a Kenyan before running clear of Italy’s Olympic bronze medallist Alessandro Lambruschini.

"If you had told me beforehand that I would beat Lambruschini to win it I would have said you were barking mad," a dazed Hough commented. "I think I was only sixth on the projected scores. I can’t believe the way things went."

This is the kind of thing that is part of the enduring magic of the Cup - or the Team Championships as they now are. 

Who will play the Hough role in Poland I wonder?