Indoor Round-Up

Most of the indoor focus fro WGEL athletes was on the UK Championships and European Indoor Championship Trials held in Sheffield over the weekend. There was a win for Tosin Oke, a UK title, despite finishing 2nd for Sarah Claxton, and another 2nd place from Shana Cox, amongst several useful Woodford performances.

In the 60mH, Sarah Claxton placed second with 8.16 secs, but still won the UK title as she was beaten by Ireland's former world indoor champion Derval O'Roukre. Sarah's best time this indoor season is 8.11 secs, which is just .01 secs outside the UKA qualifying standard for the European Indoor Championships. Also placing 2nd,over 400m was Shana Cox who recorded 52.97 secs, inside the 53.25 secs European qualifying standard. Tosin Oke who now competes for Nigeria, won the triple jump in his first indoor competition of the season. The reigning Commonwealth Champion and Olympic 7th placer cleared 16.87m for his win. In the women's triple jump there were also good performances, from Zainab Ceesay was 5th with 12.82m, and Hannah Frankson 8th with 12.70m In the high jump Ayamba Akim was 8th = with 1.72m as was HCA member Moe Sasegbon. In the long jump Kitty Eleyae placed 7th with 5.95m. Both Alex Cornwell and Tom Phillips made it through to the 1500m final where Alex placed 7th with 3m51.11 secs and Tom 8th with 3m52.65 secs, having gone slightly quicker in qualifying with 3m52.02 secs. Sadly Matt McLaughlin, who recently set a British junior record of 3m42.87 secs, didn't make it through to the final after suffering a nasty fall in his heat and was forced to drop out. Also in action in the heats, over 60m were Dan Davis and Omololu Abiodun clocking 6.99 secs and 7.02 secs respectively.

At an inter-varsity fixture at Birmingham earlier in the week there were season's bests over 400m from Paul Scanlan with 49.26 secs, and Mike Baker with 49.58 secs. There was also news from the US where racing in College Station, Texas, Sam Watts recorded 7.09 secs over 60m , 21.20 secs over 200m and ran a useful 4x400m relay leg of 47.4 secs. Also overseas, but outdoors and at altitude in Potchefstroom in South Africa, Jon Cook raced over 1500m and recorded 3m56.07 secs.

In Athlone, Ireland, Conor Bradley went 4th in the UK 1500m rankings as he clocked 3m 44.07 secs.