The weekend didn't quite go as planned, but Trackspeed1's remarkable season drives on, with TeamGB's pre-Olympics holding camp in Portugal the next stop for coach John Powell and sprinter James Ellington.
The outing at Crystal Palace on Saturday, however, didn't quite produce the desired end with James trailing in behind an exceptionally fast 200m field in the Diamond League fixture, but neither coach nor athlete were at all concerned afterwards.
"James admitted he got his race tactics wrong," said John, "we were both disappointed to have been given lane 2, and on top of that he had suffered a minor back problem mid-week which combined not to help the end result on Saturday. In fact 20-.87 easing up well short of the line was actually not bad!"
James went on in the same afternoon to run a highly respectable leg of the 4x100m relay along with Christian Malcolm, Dwain Chambers and Mark Lewis-Francis.
Both coach and athlete will now be packing their bags to fly out to the TeamGB holding camp in Monte Gordo next week for final preparations before London 2012.
The day before Crystal Palace, James' training partner David Bolarinwa contested one of the classiest World Junior Championship 200m finals in years after beating the fastest junior in the world in winning his semi-final. He couldn't hold his early round form tough, and slipped to sixth - albeit equalling his lifetime best time of 20.69s.
"David's position was a disappointment," said John who was with him in Barcelona for the event, "but he equalled his fastest ever time in a major championship under immense pressure, and that makes me very proud of him indeed."
It was a disastrous end to the week-long championships held in Barcelona's 1992 Olympic stadium, as both men's and women's relay teams were disqualified having both been real medal hopes. david was left stranded on leg three as he watched his second leg teammate go off too late and had the first leg athlete go crashing into him.
"That men's team would have shattered the British junior record," said John, "and they must be given another chance to have a crack at it before they move up an age-group next year."
The existing record of 39.05s was set in Santiago, Chile, when another Trackspeed1 sprinter, Dwayne Grant, was involved in a team including Tyrone Edgar, Tim Benjamin and Mark Lewis-Francis.
No comments:
Post a Comment