Runners from the West Midlands college made up 1 / 4 of the British group on the European Cross-Nation Champs and received 9 medals together with three particular person podium locations
But once more British cross-country runners had been topped kings and queens of Europe as they took to the turf of Turkey over the weekend. Nadia Battocletti and Jakob Ingebrigtsen received the battle for the blue riband senior races, however Britain received the general conflict with six golds and 12 medals in whole.
Not that you just’d know this from studying the nationwide newspapers on Monday. For some years now they’ve operated as if cross-country operating doesn’t exist as a sport. As compared, think about how a lot protection footballers would get pleasure from in the event that they received a European title?
Let’s hope no less than the Birmingham Put up and Birmingham Mail give the British successes on the Euro Cross a little bit of area of their columns. In spite of everything, 1 / 4 of the group on the occasion in Antalya had been drawn from the College of Birmingham with its thriving endurance programme led by former steeplechase worldwide Luke Gunn.
College students from Birmingham earned 9 medals in whole with Will Barnicoat, Jess Bailey and David Stone successful particular person gold, silver and bronze respectively. Because the college rightly boasted on social media: “If UoB had been a rustic, we might have completed second within the medal desk, solely behind GB & NI, with our 9 medals.”
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Certainly, it brings again reminiscences of when Aldershot, Farnham & District had been of their pomp with Mick Woods as lead coach. These had been the times of Emelia Gorecka, Steph Twell, Charlie Purdue, Lily Partridge and others. On the 2011 Euro Cross in Slovenia, we reported: “If Aldershot, Farnham & District had been entered as a separate nation on the previous seven editions of the European Cross-Nation Championships, they might prime the general mixed medals desk with regards to medals received in particular person races.”
The next yr, at a bitterly chilly Hungarian occasion which was as soon as once more dominated by Brits, I reported: “This was an extra victory for the Folks’s Republic of Mick Woods. If the Aldershot coach was a nationwide nation, his athletes would have topped the medals desk in recent times and Jess Coulson (Piasecki) was solely one in all his successes in Budapest – others together with under-20 silver medallist Emelia Gorecka.”
Jess Coulson (Mark Shearman)
Loughborough College has at all times been “the place to go” for budding athletes. It’s nonetheless a nice alternative, too. There are in fact different good choices for up-and-coming athletes, although. Innes FitzGerald, for instance, is clearly thriving in her first time period at Exeter College.
Don’t overlook the American faculty possibility both, with the under-23 ladies’s champion in Antalya, Phoebe Anderson, plus under-20 males’s runner-up George Couttie, each doing properly on the NCAA circuit.
READ MORE: Euro Cross 2024 protection
For British endurance runners preferring to reside and prepare at dwelling, although, the College of Birmingham is clearly the No.1 performing college proper now, as outcomes from Antalya demonstrated.
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