Runners from the West Midlands college made up 1 / 4 of the British workforce 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 warfare 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 working doesn’t exist as a sport. As compared, think about how a lot protection footballers would get pleasure from in the event that they gained a European title?
Let’s hope not less than the Birmingham Submit 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 workforce 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 whole with Will Barnicoat, Jess Bailey and David Stone profitable particular person gold, silver and bronze respectively. Because the college rightly boasted on social media: “If UoB have 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 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 12 months, 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 lately and Jess Coulson (Piasecki) was solely certainly one of 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 high-quality 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 neglect the American school possibility both, with the under-23 girls’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 stay and practice 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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