Runners from the West Midlands college made up 1 / 4 of the British crew on the European Cross-Nation Champs and gained 9 medals together with three particular person podium locations
But once more British cross-country runners have been topped kings and queens of Europe as they took to the turf of Turkey over the weekend. Nadia Battocletti and Jakob Ingebrigtsen gained the battle for the blue riband senior races, however Britain gained the general battle with six golds and 12 medals in complete.
Not that you simply’d know this from studying the nationwide newspapers on Monday. For some years now they’ve operated as if cross-country working doesn’t exist as a sport. Compared, think about how a lot protection footballers would take pleasure in in the event that they gained a European title?
Let’s hope not less than the Birmingham Put up and Birmingham Mail give the British successes on the Euro Cross a little bit of house of their columns. In any case, 1 / 4 of the crew on the occasion in Antalya have 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 complete 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 have been a rustic, we’d have completed second within the medal desk, solely behind GB & NI, with our 9 medals.”
View this publish on Instagram
Certainly, it brings again recollections of when Aldershot, Farnham & District have been of their pomp with Mick Woods as lead coach. These have 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 high the general mixed medals desk in terms of medals gained 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 Individuals’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 among 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 selection, too. There are after all 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 neglect the American faculty choice both, with the under-23 ladies’s champion in Antalya, Phoebe Anderson, plus under-20 males’s runner-up George Couttie, each doing effectively on the NCAA circuit.
READ MORE: Euro Cross 2024 protection
For British endurance runners preferring to reside and prepare at residence, although, the College of Birmingham is clearly the No.1 performing college proper now, as outcomes from Antalya demonstrated.
To learn our protection from any of the European Cross Nation Championships courting again to its starting in 1994, go to our digital archive of again points right here.
» Subscribe to AW journal right here, try our new podcast right here or signal as much as our digital archive of again points from 1945 to the current day right here
The publish Birmingham College rise to the problem in Antalya appeared first on AW.