Yesterday will probably go down as the craziest night of my athletics career - if i ever encounter anything like it again i think i'll have to quit the sport in disgust. Some exceptional performances on the track and in the field were once again, however, overshadowed by biased, partizan and comical officiating.
The morning session was another great one for our athletes. Both the mens and womens 4 x 100m teams finished 2nd in their heats to progress through to Fridays final, and both have every chance of medalling. The changeovers were, on the whole, very well executed and there's quiet confidence within both camps about our chances.
Peter 'Love Machine' Richardson ran an extremely composed 400m heat to qualify for tomorrow nights final. He later consolidated this performance by not only anchoring the mens 4 x 400m team through to win their heat but was then seen canoodling with a certain member of the Womens Basketball team - well done mate! Dave Munro was drawn in the toughest of the three heats and failed to progress to the final, but he's come out here and done way more than he expected to so it was only a matter of time before the legs got a bit too heavy.
Rach Kelly dipped under 16 seconds for the first time in the 100m hurdles heats to comfortably qualify for her final too. She eventualy finished 6th in the final lowering her time again to around 15.7 seconds - her time would have been good enough to win a medal at the last two games but the standards have been raised massively at these games - more on this later.
Finally, Rachael Franklin and Nicola Cooil both ran tactically astute races and were never troubled in reaching tomorrow nights final. Nicola was particularly impressive given that she had to wait so long for her first taste of the action, and i'd give both girls an outside chance of medalling if they can recreate this sort of form in the final.
Then came the evening session. Oh dear...
I find it quite sad really how some excellent performances are being overshadowed by incompetent and biased officiating. Take Gemma Astion's incredible 500m race for example. The girl is only 15 and ran an incredibly quick time, never looking out of place in a vastly experienced field. However, the race was overshadowed by two moments of sheer farce. Firstly, during the race they stopped the front two a lap early, only to realise what a howler they'd made. They only went up to one athlete and told them to keep running though. Which one? The Rhodes athlete of course!!! Graham Davies had been asked to help out with the officiating but was asked to leave before the race descended into chaos which makes actions such as these even more infuriating. Secondly, after the race had finished it was discovered that no time had been recorded for Gemma - this is schoolboy stuff that you wouldn't expect at a school sports day let alone an international sporting event!!!
The womens shot was also dogged by bias, disqualification and heavy-handed officials. Louise Kneen and Charlotte Christian both threw well - Lousie was slightly disappointed that she couldn't replicate her efforts at the Northern Champs but still threw over 11metres, whilst it was good for Charlotte to get the nerves out of her system and she can nopw look forward to her best event, the Hammer, on Friday. Again however, the officials got away with murder. They were measuring no-throws from Rhodes athletes, turning a blind eye to a physio who came on to treat an athlete in the competition area and had the temerity to escort Lou away from the competition for talking to another competitor. Its not good enough for Its A Knockout and we certainly shouldn't be subjected to it.
I won't talk too much about my Long Jump other than to say that it was an incredible feeling to break a 20 year old national record in a great competition - to finish 8th in such a good competiton is far from disgraceful and hopefully my injuries will clear up by Friday's Triple, where i hope to win a medal.... Still searching for that elusive 7 metres though!!! The offiating left a bitter taste in my mouth however, as the winner (a Rhodes athlete, of course) was seen by many in the crowd - not just Manxies - to have big jumps measured that were in fact fouls. At one stage the official actually winked at the athlete whilst covering up the spike marks in the plasticine with her thumb. Ok i wouldn't have won and i don't want to take anything away from a great competition on the whole, but the guy from Gotland who jumped a big LEGAL pb only to lose by 4cm will be justifiably gutted this morning.
I was also affected by two medal ceremonies, meaning i had to delay my jump by 5 minutes each time having been prepared mentally to jump each time; something that is extremely dificult to replicate. But given that i've got the core stability of a jellyfish and the speed of Johnny Vegas riding a shopmobility vehicle up Crellin's Hill, then all being well i don't see any reason why i can't be in the top 20 jumpers in the country come Commonwealth year in 2010.
I don't know too much about the other performances of the night, only that Johnboy was disappointed that his speed endurance let him down in the 5km, whilst Kev had another promising run in the same race (a pb i think). All thoughts in Andy's group will shortly be turning to December's crucial Santa Dash race, with John out to reclaim the course record set by Kevin last year - those crazy guys eh, always living on the edge...
I just thought i'd finish by making reference to the seemingly low medal tally we've accumulated so far. One gold to date really doesn't tell the whole story - the whole team have performed brilliantly thus far, and the lack of medals is mainly due to a massive jump in the standard of the competition. If you compare our performances to date to those of Shetland then we are arguably much better and would have a better tally of medals. You only have to look at performances such as Gemma and Rachael in the 1500m (silver and bronze performances two years ago), Gemma's 5k (gold 2 years ago) and even the long jump (7.01m won bronze in Shetland, 7.33m won bronze here) to see the vast improvements in the standard of the competition.
There is no such thing as an 'easy medal' any more which can only be good for the future of Manx athletics... we need an event such as this to bring our young athletes through and hopefully see a few of them break onto the national scene. We're playing a bit of catch up on similar islands such as Guernsey but we're making massive inroads into their advantage - a big thumbs up must, therefore, go to all the coaches and volunteers across the Island... keep up the good work guys!!
We've got a rest day today so no blog later - i'll post again on Thursday night, when we could have up to 18 athletes competing... it could be a looooooong blog! (not as long as this though - sorry!)
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