London Days 2-4- Neil MacPherson
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The Glamerous life of a coach
Travel the world, see exotic places, mix with the stars of the sports world. If only!
This week has gone in a blurr of race briefings, classification appointments, anti doping lectures, team meetings, swim sessions, protest hearings appeal hearings, race check ins, bike racking, warm ups, carrying of spare wheels and warm up clothes, timing of splits, counting of places, shouting of encouragement/abuse, and consoling and congratulating athletes, followed by more appeals hearings and ITU presentations. Yesterday I left the hotel at 6:30 and got back at 7:30. Diana joked as I left that I was not to be treating this as my holiday, yeah right.
Results wise it has been a really frustrating champs from both a SA and Dinamic point of view.
In the juniours the SA athletes were thrown in the deep end and they did very well to finish mid field this year, it will serve them well for the next two years in this catergory.
In the U23 Wian was welcomed to the big boy league in time honoured fashion and was duly mugged in the swim. The lad showed huge courage to battle back from way down to 15th.
In the u23 girls Dinamic’s Tayla continued to show improvement by coming in right behind Carlyn Fisher for a solid mid pack finish with a time of 2:01 and run time of 37:35.
The Paratriathlon was a real eye opener, some of these guys are inspirational. Dinamic had Oswald and Paul racing in a SA squad of 6 guys,. All six did their country proud and Oswald put a hard and stressfull year behind him to come storming through on the bike and run to miss out on third by less than 4 seconds. Paul had the swim of his life to be out of the water in 3rd and a strong bike to come in 5th and despite a PB on the run, that showed a 7min improvement from Africa Champs, could not help but slip to a very credible 9th.
Alan in his race had his customary amazing bike leg ( fastest in his group by over 30sec) and a PB on the run but a lapse in concentration meant he missed a turn and lost 30 seconds to lose out on bronze by a single second. Agonizing.
More races to come tomorrow and oh how I would love to see a 4th place transmute into something tangible.