A very cold day for the athletes competing at Trent Park at the combined Middx and Herts CC championships. Congrats to Joseph, Luca and Zac for their third place team medals and very well done to Louise Bruce who finished second in the U11 boys race as he also led the team to third place medals! Amae Van Zyl was fifth in the U17 womens race as was Luca Russo in U15 boys and a strong sixth place for Eilish O’Grady in the senior womens race.
The results are now posted here although detailed team scores are not showing in the official results yet. Further match reports to follow and below are Mikes photos from the event.
Junior Men
Well supported by Zack Atek, Luca Matharu and Joe Tarling battled it out for first Harrow athlete honours with Luca moving away in the latter stages up the long drag to the finish. In this Junior Men’s race we suspected beforehand that we had a team capable of a podium finish and we were not disappointed. Highgate and Shaftesbury took gold and silver with Harrow securing bronze team medals.
Senior Men
There were some notable performances. Damian Nevins again demonstrated his outstanding commitment to the Club by travelling all the way from Sweden for this fixture. This is the sort of effort that we should all really respect next time we think journeying 20 miles to a fixture is a big deal!
In a race packed with quality he was justly rewarded with 5th place. Jack Whitebury, Micheal O’Sullivan and Tejas Hirani clustered well, all finishing within a minute of one another.
Jim Cooper put in his solid shift and a little way behind, Daniel Draper made a very welcome return to the club after a 15 gap since his last cross country appearance for the Club. Newcomer, Henry Jakszta and the more established Richard Tarling continued to improve and both clearly enjoyed the heavy going. Martin Aslan and Jabil Chibwana closed the team with steady runs in challenging conditions.
Teamwise this was a disappointing result and a series of understandable but late withdrawals hurt us. Consequently. we couldn’t place in the first three and, unfortunately, only finished 11 runners in the 12 to score contest.
Thank you to Mike Lepps, Mark Cursons and Declan Trainor for their on course support and to Jim Cooper for coordinating entries and dishing out numbers on the day.
The Squad now looks forward to its next fixture – Race 4 of the Met League series at Welwyn on 11th January.
