Herne Hill Harriers round-up: Kristal Awuah missed out on World Championships spot – but Covid-hit Katie Snowden is selected by GB

BY GEOFF JERWOOD

Kristal Awuah only just fell short of claiming a national medal at the UK Athletics Championships meeting in Manchester last weekend – the event incorporated the trials for the Great Britain team for the World Championships in Oregon this month.

After missing out on making it into the women’s 100m final on Saturday, Herne Hill Harriers’ leading sprinter was fourth in the 200m final after a superb battle towards the finish with Sutton & District’s Peckham-born athlete Imani Lansiquot.

Awuah missed out on third place by one hundredth of a second. Her time of 22.71 was the first time she has clocked sub-23 seconds and would have broken her own club senior women’s 200m record if it hadn’t been for a strong following wind speed measured at plus-3.5 metres per second.

Awuah clocked 11.43 to qualify for Saturday’s women’s 100m semi-finals, but placed third in that race with 11.36, which was not enough for her to advance through to the final.

The selection meeting for the Great Britain World Championship team took place on Monday. Awuah was again disappointed not to be included in the women’s sprint relay squad after her omission last week from the England team for the Commonwealth Games.

However there was much better news from the selectors for 1,500m Olympian Katie Snowden. After the frustration of being unable to race in Manchester at the weekend due to an untimely bout of Covid, Snowden was named in Team GB in her event. She will now have a busy few weeks competing first for Britain at the Worlds in Oregon and then for England in the Commonwealths in Birmingham soon afterwards.

Other Herne Hill athletes who raced in Manchester included Arlo Ludewick in the men’s 1,500m heats on Friday in his first year as a senior/U23 athlete. In the slowest paced and scrappiest of the heats, Ludewick was also on the wrong end of the physicality of these sort of races at senior level and will have learned a lot. He was eighth in his heat in 3:51.68.

Harriers sprinters, in addition to Awuah, were in action in Friday’s 100m heats at SportCity. Michael Miller ran 10.69 for sixth in his men’s heat and U20 Niyah Costley was fifth in her race in 11.88 100m.

Isaac Ogunlade found that his 55.10 placed him seventh in his 400m hurdles heat.

Herne Hill teams finished in second place in the Lily B League for girls in Guildford on Saturday and then third in Lewes in the UK Young Athletes Development League Upper Age group match for U17s and U20s.

Standout team performers among a host of very good efforts included U17 Rosalie Laban, who on Saturday ran the 80m hurdles, 300m hurdles and 800m for the Girls Lily B Team and then ran the 80m hurdles, 300m hurdles, 1500m steeplechase and the 300m relays on Sunday at the YDL match.

She contributed a huge haul of team points on both days.

Another with a very busy day was U17 800m star Keeran Sriskandarajah, who completed a triathlon on Sunday morning before heading to Lewes to score for his team in events that are less familiar to him, as he competed in the high jump, javelin and the 4x400m relays. He also wanted to experience the 1,500m steeplechase as a non-scorer but won the event outright.

Julia Wedmore ran 38:42 at the Ranelagh Richmond 10km on Sunday to take 14 seconds off her PB set in 2015.

Four Herne Hill men were also in the race – M45 Robin Jones (36:01), M55 Jonathan Ratcliffe (37:10), Caleb Barnes (46:32) and Richard Tricker (50:29).