The Muller UK Athletics Championship meeting took place in Manchester over the weekend and incorporated the trials for the Great Britain team for the World Championship in Oregon next month.
After missing out on making it into the women’s 100m final on Saturday, Herne Hill’s leading sprinter Kristal Awuah was on Sunday a very good fourth in the 200m final after a superb battle towards the finish with Sutton & District athlete Imani Lansiquot.
In a very tight finish, Awuah just fell short of claiming a national medal by the narrowest of margins, only one hundredth of a second. Her time of 22.71 was the first time she has clocked sub 23 seconds and would have broken her own club senior women’s 200m record if it hadn’t been for a strong following wind speed measured at +3.5 metres per second.
Before then on Friday evening Awuah clocked 11.43 to qualify for Saturday’s women’s 100m semi-finals, but she would be disappointed to place third in that race with 11.36, which was not enough for her to advance through to the final.
The selection meeting for the Great Britain World Championship team took place on Monday. Awuah was again sadly not included in the women’s sprint relay squad after her omission last week from the England team for the Commonwealth Games.
However there was much better news from the selectors for Herne Hill’s 1500m Olympian Katie Snowden.
After the frustration of being unable to race in Manchester at the weekend due to an untimely bout of Covid, Snowden was named in Team GB in her event. She will now have a busy few weeks competing first for Britain at the Worlds in Oregon and then for England in the Commonwealths in Birmingham soon afterwards.
Other Herne Hill athletes who raced in Manchester included Arlo Ludewick in the men’s 1500m heats on Friday in his first year as a senior/U23 athlete. In the slowest paced and scrappiest of the heats Ludewick was also on the wrong end of the physicality of these sort of races at senior level and will have learned a lot in what he described as a fun experience. His time was somewhat irrelevant in this sort of race but for the record he was eighth in his heat in 3:51.68.
Harriers sprinters in addition to Awuah were in action in Friday’s 100m heats at SportCity. Michael Miller ran 10.69 for sixth in his men’s heat and Under 20 Niyah Costley was fifth in her race in 11.88 100m. Isaac Ogunlade found that his 55.10 placed him seventh in his 400m hurdles heat.
In young athletes league fixtures Herne Hill teams finished in second place in the Lily B League for girls in Guildford on Saturday and then in third in Lewes in the UK Young Athletes Development League Upper Age group match for Under 17s and Under 20s.
Stand out team performers among a host of very good efforts included U17 Rosalie Laban, who on Saturday ran the 80m hurdles, 300m hurdles and 800m for the Girls Lily B Team and then ran the 80m hurdles, 300m hurdles, 1500m Steeplechase and the 300m Relays on Sunday at the YDL match. She contributed a huge haul of team points on both days.
Another with a very busy day was U17 800m star Keeran Sriskandarajah who completed a Triathlon on Sunday morningbefore heading to Lewes to score for his team in events tat are less familiar to him, as he competed in the High Jump, Javelin and the 4 x 400m Relays. He also wanted to experience the 1500m Steeplechase as a non-scorer and surprised winning the event outright in his debut at this event.
Last Wednesday evening at the BMC meet at Sutcliffe Park Sriskandarajah smashed his 800m PB when finishing second in the B race clocking 1:54.67, a time which now ranks him fifth among U17 men in the UK so far this year.
In the 1500m races at the same meet Lewis Laylee clocked 4:00.12, George Withers a big PB 4:02.54, Andrew Warburton 4:05.24. Annabel Hobday also big PB 4:36.87 and Orla Carroll 5:00.63. The latter, like Sriskandarajah and Laban trains in James McDonald’s young athletes group.
In road racing at the Ranelagh Richmond 10km on Sunday Julia Wedmore ran a PB of 38:42 which took 14 seconds off her previous best time set a few years ago in 2015.
Four Herne Hill men were also in the race, with M45 Robin Jones clocking 36:01, M55 Jonathan Ratcliffe 37:10, Caleb Barnes 46:32 and Richard Tricker 50:29.
Geoff Jerwood