With half term hitting on many of the participating Counties the younger races were a little light on numbers this week, but AFD came on mass to up the stakes and had a great club day out.
Girls / Women
U13 – 1, 3, 7, 8, 9, 19 – Team 2nd
U15 – 6, 9, 10, 12 – Team 2nd
U17 – 4, 17, 18 – Team 3rd
U20 – 2, 4, 6, 11 – Team 1st
Senior – 9, 12, 15, 18 – Team 3rd
Boys / Men
U13 – 1, 2, 3, 4, 6 – Team 1st
U15 – 2, 3, 11, 12 – Team 1st
U17 – 1, 3, 4, 5, 6 – Team 1st
Senior – 4, 10, 12 – Team 1st
So a great day for boosting the League positions across the board. Robbie had a great run in the U17’s with the previous league leader (Lachlan Wellington) missing a second race and dropping out of contention the race was still going to be hard with current 2nd place Zac Mahamed, and 3rd place Jacob O’Hara still running. The strong AFD squad looked keen from the start and by the end of the 1st lap, of the 3 lap race, a break away group had formed comprising of Zac, Jacob, Robbie and the AFD possie, Max Heyden, Marcus Shantry, Ollie Percival and Lewis Reid. Coming over the top of the hill and Robbie decided to push the pace a little, taking the others a little by surprise it wasn’t long before a gap began to form, and before the hill was reached for a 2nd time Zac had pulled out, leaving Robbie clear at the front, chased by Jacob, in turn chased by the rest of the AFD boys.
With the boys about to come over the rise for the 3rd and final time the starting horn is blasted and a stampeded of senior men explodes down the starting straight, Robbie hears the horn and puts everything he has in to his finish in a successful attempt to get past the merge point before the Men joined the course, which caused not a small amount of confusion for the boys caught in the middle of the madness. Robbie clear, but being chased down now by a rampaging pack of seniors managed to stay ahead of them for the 20m dash to the peel off point for the finishing straight, where the others were was to be honest hard to tell, and with conflicting advice being shouted about hard to see where they were going to come from. But despite the chaos the positions coming up the hill remained the finishing postions of the runners;
1st – Robbie Coupland (AFD)
2nd – Jacob O’Hara (Portsmouth)
3rd – Ollie Percival (AFD)
4th – Lewis Reid (AFD)
5th – Marcus Shantry (AFD)
6th – Max Heyden (AFD)
Well done to everyone who ran through the snow, over the cobbles and battled the chaos. A really good day out for AFD.
AFD looking strong and dominating the numbers in the leading pack