Congratulations to Hayley Tomlinson, Chris Hamer and Matt Coloe, who all won medals at the state road racing championships at Sandown on Saturday 26th May 2007.
In the most favourable conditions for years, Box Hill had an excellent representation of runners and some very good individual results. There was a fairly strong headwind blowing into the runners’ faces in the back straight, but conditions were otherwise excellent, temperate and sunny.
The field was a very large one, and on starting a group of twenty-five runners established a break over the rest of the field after half on the first lap of the 3.2 k. course. Michaels Shelley broke clear before the end of the second lap and about 15 seconds adrift of him, Clint (Perrett (Mentone), David McNeill (Doncaster) and Richard Jeremiah (Deakin) were fighting out the minor placings. He maintained and extended his lead to win comfortably. Eventually, McNeill prevailed to place second, with Perrett finishing third, and Jeremiah fourth. Steve Moneghetti (Ball. YCW) entered and ran moderately following his participation in the great Ocean Road 45 k. “Marathon”, the preceding weekend. Lee Troop (Geelong) was in the same situation, and these two internationals finished 10th (30:10) and 11th (30:27) respectively.
We had strong male representation, with fourteen athletes in the senior men’s division. Unfortunately, several athletes who had entered failed to show up so we were weakened in our Division 1 team and were one short of finishing a third team.
Alan Craigie ran strongly the whole way to place 19th overall, just ahead of Chris Hamer one place back. Chris also ran very impressively, and was the second Under 20 athlete to finish behind Ben Ashkettle (Doncaster) who recoded 14th place. Andrew White continued his return to form and started of modestly, building his cadence and position through the race to be the third Box Hill athlete over the line (26th), slightly ahead of Daniel Clarke, twenty or so metres behind in 27th position. Matt Coloe also ran impressively to win the Bronze medal in the Under 20 race, and was 32nd overall. Next in was John Meagher who ran an even race to place 35th. David Jimenez was our 5th Division 1 competitor, followed in by Navin Arunasalam (Under 20) and Paul Boxshall, who completed our Division I team.
Our Under 20 men excelled themselves, with Chris Hamer placing second and Matt Coloe placing third as noted above. Navin Arunasalam also ran well to finish 79th overall and was probably in the top 10 of the Under 20 men. As runners were not wearing identifying tags it was difficult to separate out who was in the junior race as it was run as part of the senior race.
Jocelyn Keage was our best placed female athlete, completing the race in 40:03. Amanda Harper, Talitha Crawford and Christine Hopkins made up the Division 1 women’s team.
Place Name Finish time 1 Michael Shelley (Inv) 29:20 2 David McNeill (Doncaster) 3 Clint Perrett (Mentone) 4 Richard Jeremiah (Geelong) 19 Alan Craigie 30:55 20 Chris Hamer(U/20) 30:56 26 Andrew White 31:30 27 Daniel Clarke 31:36 32 Matt Coloe (U/20) 31:51 35 John Meagher 31:55 66 David Jimenez 33:25 79 Navin Arunasalam (U/20) 33:59 83 Paul Boxshall 34:00 99 Alex Diorietes (U/20) 34:35 131 Chris O'Connor 35:13 169 Andrew Robinson 36:10 181 John Vaitkunas 36:22 301 Scott Boxshall 39:02 316 David Ayers 39:27 324 Bill Dyer 39:35 322 Barry Whittle 41:00 494 Adam Pepper 44:13 566 Cameron Nagle (U/18) 46:49
Place Name Finish time 344 32 Joc Keage 40:03 411 48 Amanda Harper 41:27 490 70 Talitha Crawford 44:05 495 71 Kristine Hopkins 44:14 559 98 Priscilla Barrington 46:33 Underage 3000 m Road race 1 Hayley Tomlinson (U/20) 10:46 15 Liz Dobson (U/20) 12:21