Just five days ago, the 2014 Eurovision Song Contest came to a climax with the grand final. And unlike in previous years, we don’t have to wait for the split results anymore – they are now openly available on eurovision.tv to provide more transparency.

Winners and losers

Of course, the victory of Austria will go down as one of the most remarkable victories in the history of the contest for various reasons. Time will tell just how much of a commercial chart impact Conchita Wurst will have (though the continent-wide media impact of the Austrian win cannot be denied). In pure statistical terms, however, not only did “Rise Like A Phoenix” achieve the fourth-highest total score in ESC history, but it also brought to an end the longest time a country has had to wait between two victories (48 years, to be exact).

While we’re talking about long waits: the Netherlands, who finished second, hadn’t reached the podium since their last victory with Teach-In back in 1975. A great success for the Common Linnets, who are also doing good business around Europe with “Calm After The Storm” and their self-titled album.

At the other end of the scoreboard, the 20th place for Greece was their worst result since 1998, while Italy, Azerbaijan and France went home with their worst-ever placings. It’s worth noting, of course, that there are more countries nowadays – Italy finished joint-last with no points at all in 1966, which has to be interpreted as a “worse” result – but France’s last place does represent the first time the country has ever suffered that fate in a contest of any size.

Qualifiers

Some countries have an unbroken qualification record, while others fail year after year.

The most notable qualifiers this year were San Marino and Montenegro, who reached the grand final for the first time ever. Congratulations! Among the other countries with more failures than successes in their past five attempts, there were encouraging qualifications for Slovenia, Switzerland, Belarus, the Netherlands, returnees Poland – and, of course, Austria.

On the other hand, several countries that have become more used to qualifying than not qualifying in their past five attempts were forced to sit on the sidelines on Saturday night: Albania, Georgia, Estonia, Ireland, Lithuania, Moldova and Portugal all failed to build on their decent qualification records in recent times.

Televoters vs. juries – harmony and discord

Not for the first time since the introduction of the 50/50 televoting and jury system in 2009, there was considerable disagreement between the public and the supposed experts. The most notable “losers” in this respect were Poland and Switzerland, which were ranked 5th and 7th respectively in the pure televote but which the juries placed in their overall bottom five. Meanwhile, the juries placed Malta and Azerbaijan 6th and 8th overall, but that wasn’t enough to save either country from a poor position on the scoreboard thanks to their weak televoting result. And of course it’s worth noting that Conchita Wurst would have had an even clearer victory if it had been solely down to the televoters!

In the semi-finals, Portugal would have qualified from semi 1 instead of Azerbaijan under a televote-only system, while in semi 2, Ireland would have replaced Malta in the grand final.

One notable development this year was that the EBU published the full breakdown of how each jury member voted. This has led to some intriguing insights that go far beyond the constraints of this article – we’ll be picking up that topic at a later date!

And what about our prediction?

Back on Saturday, our team tried its best to predict the outcome of the grand final. You can read our detailed thoughts from the time here! The winner, Austria, was one of the six countries that our team mentioned as potential winners. But what else did we get right – and wrong?

Of the songs we saw as likely winners, only Molly from the United Kingdom ultimately failed to reach the top 10. We also generally predicted Malta and Greece to reach the top 10, whereas both countries ended up missing the left-hand side of the scoreboard by some distance. That gave us a 7/10 rating for the group in terms of our top 10 predictions. Elsewhere, all of us correctly predicted Slovenia for the bottom 8.

Only Danny, our man on the ground in Copenhagen, got the prediction for the first place correct. His predictions for Sweden (3rd place) and Spain (10th place) were also exactly right. Meanwhile, Martin’s prediction of 4th place for Azerbaijan was possibly the most inaccurate individual prediction – Felix’s 10th-place finish for San Marino was also somewhat wide of the mark, but we probably all secretly wished for a fairytale ending to Valentina Monetta’s “third time lucky” story!

All of which goes to show that being an experienced ESC fan means everything and nothing in terms of making accurate predictions – there will always be some things we all see, and some things we miss completely…

Looking forward

Stay tuned to us as we look forward to ESC 2015 in Austria, including all the key news on next year’s contest and interesting features to keep you entertained during the off-season!