Will Barnicoat, Tomer Tarragano, Jess Bailey and Olympic marathoner Jared Ward are among the many entries for the 2025 championships this weekend
On Saturday greater than 2000 scholar athletes will descend on Blackweir Fields in Cardiff for the British Universities and Schools Cross Nation Championships. Racing within the shadow of Cardiff Fort, many can have their faces daubed in paint with the colors of their establishment. For fairly a number of it is going to be the spotlight of the winter season.
Opponents will vary from teenage ‘freshers’ who’re mid-way by way of their first 12 months at college, by way of to athletes like Jared Ward, a veteran American marathon star who completed sixth within the Olympic marathon in Rio in 2016 and now, aged 36, is learning for an MBA in international enterprise at Oxford College.
Amongst his many achievements, Ward has a statistics diploma from Brigham Younger College, a marathon finest of two:09:25 set in Boston in 2019 and he’s a father to 6 kids. Given this, there’ll certainly be a number of jokes in Cardiff this weekend that he’s virtually sufficiently old to be the dad of most of his youthful rivals. It is going to be no laughing matter as soon as the gun fires, although.
Jared Ward (Getty)
Ward is about to face, amongst others, Will Barnicoat, Tomer Tarragano and David Stone from Birmingham College. Barnicoat and Stone received gold and bronze within the under-23 males’s race on the European Cross Nation Championships in Turkey in December whereas Tarragano received the lads’s race on the Liverpool Cross Problem earlier this winter.
Barnicoat additionally has a title to defend as he received the BUCS crown in Leeds 12 months in the past, ending half a minute forward of Tarragano and Oliver Good.
Will Barnicoat and David Stone (Getty)
It’s exhausting to inform what sort of form Ward is in, however he confirmed an affinity to usually muddy cross-country situations by rising as winner of the Oxford vs Cambridge Varsity match in December.
The bottom could be just a little higher in Cardiff this weekend. Regardless of current heavy rain, Saturday is about to be largely dry and veteran race organiser Graham Finlayson tells AW: “The course is run on open parkland with some woodland part and a piece of a stone mud and 5 street crossings. It’s flat and it is going to be quick.”
The placement is totally different to the Llandaff Fields course that has staged the Cardiff Cross Problem in current seasons, though Blackweir Park used to host Cross Problem occasions prior to now.
With Barnicoat, Stone and Tarragano prone to be main the cost, Birmingham might be robust to beat within the males’s staff competitors. The current European Cross Nation Championships noticed the West Midlands college provide round 1 / 4 of the complete British squad and they are going to be in Cardiff in drive.
Loughborough’s purple reign as kings of the scholar cross-country scene seems to be over, in the interim at any price. Nonetheless, the East Midlands college can have runners like Will Rabjohns in competition and undoubtedly good power in depth.
William Rabjohns leads
Final 12 months’s occasion noticed Birmingham win the lads’s staff race comfortably from Oxford, Loughborough and Cambridge.
Native runners will wish to make their mark this weekend, too, similar to Dafydd Jones from Cardiff College, plus athletes from Cardiff Met.
The 2024 ladies’s winner Amelia Quirk from Birmingham is just not racing this time, so there might be a brand new champion. Birmingham nonetheless has a robust staff, although, that includes athletes similar to Jess Bailey, Eleanor Strevens, Poppy Tank, Kate Willis, amongst others.
Jess Bailey (David Hewitson)
Loughborough are the defending ladies’s staff champions after having received a decent contest in 2024 from Birmingham and Cambridge. India Barwell, who led the Loughborough staff final 12 months in fourth place, is about to run once more as nicely.
Cambridge look significantly spectacular this time, with Niamh Bridson-Hubbard, Bea Wooden and Poppy Craig-McFeely working nicely this winter.
As well as, be careful for Mia Waldmann of St Mary’s, Lizzie Wellsted of Leeds Beckett and Rebecca Flaherty of Oxford.
READ MORE: 2024 BUCS Cross protection
Innes FitzGerald, nevertheless, won’t be racing. A brisker at Exeter College, the two-time European under-20 cross-country champion is racing indoors as an alternative.
Former winners of BUCS cross-country titles embody Paula Radcliffe, Chris Thompson and Lisa Dobriskey however this weekend some new names will earn their place within the historical past books.
Look out for AW’s protection on-line and by way of our social media channels.
Timetable
11.30am – ladies’s quick race
12.15pm – males’s quick race
1.15pm – ladies’s lengthy race
2.15pm – males’s lengthy race
» 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