Nopesport

Compass Sport Cup – Yorkshire/North East round

SYO put on a good event for this year’s qualifying round of the Compass Sport Cup, held at Cawthorne Woods. The use of Darton High School as the event centre worked well, particularly as the conditions were not ideal on the day.

The forest was surprisingly nice (visions of another grotty Yorkshire forest were thought about on the trip down) with the brambles merely tripping you up at irregular intervals rather than ripping your legs to pieces. The courses were well planned, electronic punching being used to great effect so that the Brown course was 10.6km in a rather small forest.

Times were quick, Tim Tett posting a fraction over 6mins/km to win the Brown course, though the potential was there for a number of people on this course to go sub-6 mins/km as mistakes crept in. Another factor for quick times was the particularly high turnout from a number of competing clubs, with many of Britain’s top age-ranked runners turning up for their respective clubs.

Other notable individual performances were had on the senior women’s course, where Helen Winskill won by 4 minutes over Jenny James, who in turn was a further 9 minutes ahead of 3rd place. Helen only finished outside the top 3 on 1 of the 18 splits as well! George Stevens (AIRE) also had a particularly impressive run, winning all but the last 2 splits to take victory by 4 mintes!

The common last control meant that everyone was able to blast down the 120m long track for the glory of sprint-finish maestro – won by none other than Supersaint in 20 seconds, 1 second up on Martin Ward (SYO) and Garth Watson (CLARO). For the women, it was the juniors who reigned run-in queens, with Beth Emberton (W16 – EPOC) and Alice Leake (W14 – EBOR) both finishing in 27 seconds.

As far as the team results go, AIRE’s huge strength in depth helped them to a comfortable victory in the Cup competition, though it was more a case of plenty of reasonable performances than a few spectacular runs, with only 2 of the 7 courses being won by AIRE members.

In the Trophy, CLARO were clear winners, with 6 of the 7 courses being won by their members with huge victories in the 2 junior courses (of 17 mins on the Light Green and 23 mins on the Orange!)