Ace

Well Done to Tracey Morris

Dave

Sunday, 19 March 2006

Tracey came a very impressive fourth in the Commonwealth Games Women’s Marathon and recorded a PB.

England won both bronzes, for Liz Yelling and Dan Robinson (in the Men’s Marathon).

Despite the doubts of Steve Cram and Brendan Foster who thought that he was barely over half-way after two hours, Errol Duncan finished in 14th with 3:11:21, and he passed the early leader, Christopher Isegwe Njunguda by half way. (That can’t be right; the official results have Isegwe Njunguda taking 31 minutes 34 seconds to run the 1.1K between 20K and halfway.) His best is actually a respectable 2:47, so four hours was never that likely. Still, rather him than me.

During the race, Steve Cram mentioned that one of the Australians had said in the press conference that he planned to take a caffeine tablet. He came fourth in 2:16:32, which is quite a long way off his planned Commonwealth Record (or under 2:09:12), so maybe he’ll think again.

I don’t know if Kate Smyth took a caffeine tablet, but she was "badly dehydrated" at the end and "collapsed after crossing the finish line in seventh place and had to be carried from the arena by officials." She appears to be OK now.

There’s one Welsh athlete in tomorrow’s Men’s 5000m. Craig Mottram looks a good bet for the gold; he’s third fastest on paper, but the relatively low quality of the field makes a slow race look very likely.

241 words.

Posted at 11:34 am

Category: Stuff Which Fits Nowhere Else

Month: 2006 March

Comments

454 Denis

I think the times for Christopher Isegwe Njunguda are correct - he blew up with what looked like a pulled muscle while still in the lead. For a while he tried gamely to hobble on and I guess that was his slow km - then he saw sense & withdrew.

It’s a real shame as he could have done London instead & got a lot of appearance money, so he was really running Melbourne for his country & not for the cash.

BTW - does anyone have a Brendan Foster commentary filter. Considering the guy is an ex-runner, he makes the most clueless & asinine remarks that I doubt even my 6 yr old nephew would make. At times I have to mute the volume to save my blood pressure. We should get Private Eye to do a Forsterballs column instead of Colmanballs.

1:46 pm on 19/03/2006
457 Tim

Dennis - ’Fosterballs’, you’ve been beaten to it ! Many fine examples shared on the RW site, eg

"the 20 year old Kenyan is just a few weeks short of his 19th birthday"

"All the runners have prepared equally well for this race" (on the startling at FLM !)

"Paula has prepared better than anyone else for this race" (the same FLM, 5 mins later)

etc

In short, we may be going over old ground - to quote one of the clubs finest minds..

"I’ve always found Brendan Foster partisan, blinkered, uninformative, unamusing, and generally useless".

(see http://www.lescroupiersrunningclub.org.uk/ace/mt-archives/000043.php)

PS The womens race was excellent last night, even though we only saw ~30 secs of Tracey Morris. Makes me proud to be Welsh !
3:01 pm on 19/03/2006

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