Women excel in Sydney run

Press, 2 September 1985, Page 3

Women excel in Sydney run

NZPA staff correspondent Sydney New Zealand’s women runners were all over their rivals, but the men were badly outclassed in a day of mixed fortunes for the national junior cross-coun-try team in Sydney on Saturday.

The New Zealand women gave the locals a running lesson in the under-20 division of the Australian national championships, filling the first four places and taking the team’s title. But the junior men found themselves almost out of their league on a course described by their team manager, Mr Don Willoughby, as tough and hilly even by New Zealand standards.

The men finished seventh, eighth, fourteenth and twentieth to be fourth in the Australian interstate team competition. But with the competition being used to blood New Zealand’s future senior runners with the 1988 world championships in Auckland in mind, the women gave officials plenty to feel satisfied about.

Running under instructions to be steady rather than flashy, the women were buried in the pack as the field went out of the

straight for the first round of the Bankstown circuit in Sydney’s south-west. The Australians led for the first 2km, but then the steadiness and strength of the New Zealanders began to show and the “veteran” Christine Morriss, aged 19, from Te Awamutu, took over and was never headed for the next 4km, followed closely by the baby of the team, the national champion, Sonia Barry, aged 19, from New Plymouth. With Wellington’s Andrea Stuart and Invercargill’s Tracy Kennedy working their way through the big field, the New Zealanders powered on to the home straight. It was there, 150 m from home that Barry turned on a powerhouse sprint to reel in Morriss and go to the line a second clear, with Stuart one second further back, third.

With times of 22min 225, 22:24 and 22:25 on the clock, the next home was Kennedy who finished fourth in 22:44.

At no stage in the junior men’s section, where the New Zealanders found the pace just too fast and tough, did they look like making a real impression on the Australians. They hung on grimly for their Bkm race with Kerry Faas from

Christchurch home seventh in 26:07, followed by Gary Chettleburgh eighth in 26:17, while national champion Ross Moore from Hastings was fourteenth in 26:36, and Richard Moore from Invercargill twentieth in 26:58. Willoughby said after the race that the New Zealand men at least knew what they were up against in international cross country and were already talking about what they had to do to make up the deficit. “The pace was too fast and they were just not in the same class,” he said. “New Zealanders always find Australians hard, but these Australian runners get conditioned at the Institute of Sport, and the extra intensity of training showed.”

Willoughby said the women too had something to think about with two Australians who could have competed in the under-20 division competing successfully in the senior and under-18 divisions successfully.

In the senior division, New Zealander John Campbell from Invercargill, who was running in the crosscountry as an individual, put in a good solid run to finish tenth.