Herne Hill Harriers round-up: Awuah smashes PB at World Challenge Meeting

BY GEOFF JERWOOD

Kristal Awuah continued her fantastic season with an absolutely sensational run at the IAAF World Challenge Meeting in Berlin.

Awuah, 19, is already a double World Junior Championship bronze medallist in the 100m and 4x100m in Tampere, Finland earlier in the summer.

Her latest performance saw her smash her personal best with an 11.16 (-0.1m/s) run to win the B 100m at a top senior meeting.

This time elevates Awuah to third in the 2018 UK senior women’s 100m rankings. Even more impressively, Awuah moves up to second on the all-time British junior (U20) list and is only 0.02 of a second outside recent European senior champion Dina Asher-Smith’s British junior 100m record.

Last week the team to represent Europe in the upcoming IAAF Continental Cup next weekend in Ostrava was announced and Awuah’s latest revision to her own Herne Hill Harriers club senior and U20 women’s record justifies her inclusion in the Europe 4x100m relay squad at this event, alongside Asher-Smith.

Five Harriers athletes completed a gruelling 25 laps of the Ladywell track in the 10,000m races organised by Kent AC on Sunday.

Raj Paranandi (over-40) had a superb run and was ultimately chased down by one runner in the final couple of laps as he finished second in the fifth of the seven races of the day with a big PB of 34:09.14.

Robin Jones clocked 35:45.59 in the same race. Trevor Chilton ran 40:16.00 and Gav Newsum 37:48.56, both running track PBs for the distance. Jonathan Ratcliffe, completed an all veteran cast of finishers, clocking 37:06.01.

At the Woking AC Young Athletes Open Meeting, also on Sunday, Dante Clarke followed up his big long jump PB at the Herne Hill Open eight days earlier with another leap that is clearly ahead of the rest of the UK U13 boys rankings for this year as he was measured at 5.77m for a meeting record.

Lily-Rose Brown was another meeting best performer in the U11 girls 600m (1:49.11) Lucy Wright clocked 1:57.27.

Brown’s time was quicker than the corresponding age boys race on the day. Her brother Jaden Kennedy set a meeting record for the U13 boys 800m in 2:16.6 back in 2016.

Harvey Kande is still very new to athletics but after qualifying for the U15 800m final with a time of 2:27.88, he went on to take gold in a new PB of 2:09.56. Susannah Hirst (U17 girls) also won a silver in the 1500m.