South of England XC Championships - Young Athletes
Canaan Solomon’s refreshing honesty when being interviewed on the podium summed up the general reaction to the conditions underfoot at the South of England Cross Country Championships at Parliament Hill. With his U15B silver medal hanging safely round his neck, he answered Joe Mower’s question “...so Parliament Hill; love it or hate it?” with an emphatic choice of “hate it!” (but with a broad grin). Despite this, to grab the silver medal in his first winter as an U15 was an excellent effort and had the conditions been firmer, he may even have improved on it. Canaan’s deficit on surprised winner, Alex Hampson (Nene Valley Harriers) was only 4 seconds, the same as his own advantage on Herne Hill’s Ed Olsen in third.
In all the junior races, the U15B race was the only one to feature a scoring team of Woodford athletes; half term school trips, injury and illness accounted for a good number of absentees. However there were many fine individual performances so what we lacked quantity, we made up for in quality but for all athletes, with the conditions being very heavy underfoot, it was at times a struggle to keep upright in the mud particularly on the downhill sections.
Behind Canaan in the places stakes, came Ed Shepherd (U20M) who finished just outside the medals in 4th place, 10 seconds down on the bronze medallist in the 8km race – a fine effort in his first winter with the club. Jessica Burgess’s good form continued as she impressed again with an excellent 9th in the U17W event; team-mate Amelia Barrett was 56 seconds back in a fine 18th place with Steph Smith picking up 97th. Sidnie Sales was our sole representative in the U20W coming 11th in a field where Emelia Gorecka (AFD) outclassed the rest in winning by 24 seconds and had crossed the line before the third placed runner had appeared at the top of the last hill.
U13G Isabella Hoy was disappointed with her 14th place (a view not shared by others) but with the first 55 runners all within 90 seconds of the winner any hint of being off colour can easily mean a difference of 10 places – certainly, the conditions did not favour her. For the U15G, Rosie Poole (24th) and Jodi Ratcliff (35th) had impressive runs and they were will supported by Alicia McArdell (66th) just 36 seconds behind Jodi.
In the U13B’s event, we were one short of a team with James Wakefield first home in 63rd (only 1’16” down on the winner) with Alfie Poole just 4 seconds and 7 places back in 70th and justifiably pleased with his first major championship outing. Chris Hogg backed up in 190th less than couple of minutes down. Behind Isabella in U13Gs, Jessica Archard had another very useful performance and picked up 87th place (only 74 seconds behind her team-mate) with Katie Woodstock coming home in 198th. For our U17M, George Hoy was our sole runner and was happy with his outing, finishing in 68th in the competitive field with runners crossing the line at the rate of one a second.
Our sole complete team (U15B) finished 21st overall with Harry Cavell (167), Loren Alleyne (184) and Taylor Reece (186) to back up Canaan’s 2nd place. Harry and Taylor then joined Chris Hogg to provide much needed and appreciated vocal support for our senior men later as they tackled the three long laps round the Heath