Herne Hill Harriers young athletes won medals at a South of England championships for the second successive week at the Southern cross country relays held on a scorching afternoon at Biggleswade. Instead of mud usually associated with cross country temperatures of 80 degrees greeted the runners over a tough course making conditions even more difficult.
Our U13 boys and girls teams both won bronze medals in the most strongly contested age groups in an event which was much better supported than the last edition earlier this year.
Our boys had won bronze medals at the road relays and again had an exciting race with Chiltern Harriers who had beaten them by a place at Aldershot. Paul Burgess went off on first leg this time and contested the lead throughout finishing a close second, Callum Barker set off twenty metres behind after some crucial confusion at the change over but held that position to hand over to Tom Singhgolden who was being chased closely by a City of Norwich athlete. Tom attempted to close the gap on the Chiltern athlete and hold off the City of Norwich athlete but behind them was a Bedford athlete flying through the field on the final leg and in a desperate finish the Bedford athlete passed Tom up the final hill & snatched victory in the final strides. Our third place capped a great start to the winter season for the U13 boys squad with Johnny Baggs and Oscar Millard having great runs for the B team.
Our U13 girls were led on first leg by Saskia Millard who finished strongly in second place, Breagha Campbell ran well on second leg to hand over to Izzie Lamport-Went on third leg in third place and Izzie held that position for bronze medals, the first time an U13 girls team from the club had won medals at this level.
In other age groups our U15 girls finished 8th, our U15 boys were 9th and U17 boys were 9th.
Steve Bosley