Great Games!

Jonathon Kiplimo Sawe, Vincent Kiprotich Mutai & Robbie Farnham Rose 1st, 2nd & 3rd
1500m

I do seem to have avoided pneumonia despite the weather since my last post.

One of the problems with blogging, unless you're like my chum, Murray from www.manxathletics.com, a man burning his candle at both ends and the middle who writes a great blog, updates his websites, trains every day as well as upholding his commitments as a husband and father, it's difficult to transpose the feeling of the moment at the time everything's happening because you're so busy. By the time all the dust has settled and a spare five minutes appears, the impact is lost.

However, I will try nonetheless.

The Commonwealth Youth Games, despite the best attempts of the Manx weather (though on this occasion, we'll blame the Americans for sending us their hurricane) to sabotage everything was a great success, terrific to be involved with and provided us great reason to be very proud of our Island and its people.

The atmosphere was brilliant and it was superb to have the best young sportsmen and women from 67 countries all competing here.

Our particular involvement which you will probably understand if you have read earlier blogs was with athletics and while some of my time was spent inside the Call Room with the athletes waiting to compete, I was lucky enough to be able to witness some spectacular performances.

Although it has to be said that not every event had a great depth of standard, the calibre of some of them was stellar, almost literally in the case of South African Javelin thrower, Morne Moolman who must have grazed the stars when he landed his weapon 81.53m against the considerable wind which I have on reasonably good authority is further than anyone in the world has thrown this year in his age group.

The Kenyan team were staying at the Welbeck and the winner of the 800m, Timothy Kitum ran 1:49 in a howling gale, to finish ahead of world record holder Leonard Kirwa Kosencha who would have finished the silver medal position in the Daegu World Championships had he run his personal best time.

Tosha the CYG mascot with Kit Carriers

Our Hotel also had the u17 World Champion Steeplechaser, Nora Tannui staying with us who managed gold in that race and bronze in the 3,000m but wanted more then anything to have an orange volunteer shirt.

Medal Ceromony for 2,000m Steeplechase Gold: Nora Tannui(Kenya); Silver: Nancy Cheptegei (Uganda); Bronze: Lilian Chemweno (Kenya)

I'm sure that Jonathon Kiplimo Sawe who won 1500m will also be a world star in the future but the whole Championships were about more than the winners and it was great to also have the smaller teams from Anguilla, Grenada, British Virgin Islands and the Falklands with us who were competing at probably the highest standard possible for their nations.
BVI team members
Friendships were forged and team uniforms and badges were exchanged and this combined with the gales provided one of the funniest stories: The fast craft services had to be cancelled on the proposed day of departure but fortunatley, there had been advanced warning that his was likely to happen and some countries made their escape early. One of the biggest teams was Australia and the fact that they had told the organisers that they would not be travelling by sea meant that they thought they just about had capacity on the Ben-my-Chree for everyone to be accommodated.

So when one of the Committee saw a girl walking up in an Aussie tracksuit, she nearly had kittens because she thought they'd been unable to travel and had now turned up at the boat.

She frantically questioned the young lady in question, wondering what would possibly happen but on receiving only a couple of words of pigeon english in response, realised that she had merely swapped clothes with an antipodean friend!

Kenya Team Managaer, Jimi Chacha with young Harry