By Darren Hatton
Two of Thanet Athletic Club’s U13 girls ventured over to Tonbridge to compete in the annual County Combined Events Champs. Sir Mo Farah was present at the event on Bank Holiday Monday with one of his daughters, so the girls were eager to impress.
Mia Brady and Bella Winfield, fresh from watching KJT at the recent Paris Olympics, were gunning to follow in her footsteps!
Last year Mia Brady competed in the annual event for the first time in the U13s and finished 9th, This year she was determined to try and get amongst the medals. She started off with a PB in the 70mH (12.19s) to take the lead before moving on to the high jump. She kept her parents on the edge of their seats when she had to depart the competition halfway through to see the onsite physio because of an ongoing back issue. When she came back the bar was already higher than her previous personal best of 1.27m, but she went on to clear 1.30m, and then her final clearance of 1.33m which just about kept her in the lead overall.
The next event was the shot putt and Mia continued her great day with another personal best of 6.85m, but this wasn’t enough to rise from 2nd place.
Moving on to the long jump she had a few issues with her run up, but on the 3rd and final jump she managed to produce her second best ever jump of 3.91m to keep her in 2nd place.
Last of all was the dreaded 800m, and Mia knew that it was going to be very close between her and 3rd place to see which way round the medals would finish. Mia ran her second quickest ever 800m time (2:58.44) even though she was holding her back from start to finish, but she narrowly missed out on the silver medal by 5 points (which is the equivalent to around 0.6s!).
Mia’s final total of 1981 points to win the bronze medal smashed her previous best points score of 1778.
Bella Winfield was competing in a Pentathlon for the first time, and a few other events she has never competed in, so it was a very daunting experience for her when everyone else was also nearly two years older than her!
Bella started off in the hurdles with her first PB of 15.28s and considering this was the first time she has done a complete race of 3 strides between each hurdle it was a great race for her.
Next was the high jump, and having only cleared 1.05m in training her end result in this competition was 1.12m and again, another personal best performance.
The third event was the shot and with Bella continuing to grow it was always going to be a bit of a struggle, but she took a lot of information on board and threw a very competitive personal best distance of 3.75m.
The fourth event was the long jump and pulled a personal best mark of 3.44m out in the final round to keep the positive momentum going before taking on the last event of the day in the 800m.
This was probably Bella’s best event of the day because she has only run 3:19.00 before but she produced a superb display of grit and determination to clock a 3:00.18 personal best to finish on 1228 points in a very respectable 12th place.
Lead coach Darren Hatton said: “Mia and Bella are a massive inspiration and credit to the club. I couldn’t have asked for any more from both of them, and their will and drive to do their absolute best is something that I look forward to seeing develop over the next 8-10 years.”
Leave a Reply