Computer crisis averted at secondary school champs

When I arrived at the Manawatu Community Athletics Track last Saturday to start setting up for the Manawatu Secondary Schools Championships and discovered that the computer we use to run the meeting programming refused to start, I feared a disaster.

Fortunately we were able to survive this crisis and the meeting proceeded without too much obvious difficulty, thanks to the excellent work in the control room.

Club athletes Vanessa Story and Simone Small stepped in and shouldered a lot of the extra work and, together with Rob Dabb, we were able to share one computer to run two important functions.

We in the Palmerston North Athletics Club have developed a great culture where athletes who are not competing are encouraged to help out as officials.

This was aptly demonstrated with top sprinters Zac Topping and Shaun McFarlane helping in the starting, marshalling and Hardeep Kaur running the hammer events.

The meeting saw four stadium records, plus eight Manawatu secondary schools records broken, with Adam Millar being awarded the Albert Pootjes Trophy for the second year in a row.

Schools records were set in three events – the shot put, discus and hammer throw – an outstanding achievement.

However, the performance that had people talking was the sight of Ben Langton-Burnell sending the javelin sailing 60.28 metres for a stadium open record.

It was five metres further than the previous record.

When Katie Neumann and Emma McKay line up for a sprint race, you can guarantee it is going to be a close race .

Three weeks ago, they dead-heated in the Manawatu-Wanganui championships and on Saturday once again, the photo-finish camera was unable to split them in determining which athlete finished third in the junior girls' 100m.

With the camera able to time to a hundredth of a second, getting a dead heat is unusual.

But what would be the odds of this happening to the same athletes in two different races?

If there was a courage award for the meeting, it would have to go to Palmerston North Girls' High School's Rachel Duff.

After suffering a major knee injury playing netball, which has her scheduled for knee reconstruction surgery in the next few weeks, it would have been very easy for her to give things away and sit out the season. But that's not Rachel.

With guidance from her coaches, she has modified her training, focusing on quality rather than quantity and she got back on to the track and competed.

Seeing Rachel only just narrowly fail to pull back Rebecca Mudd in the senior girls 400m almost had us in tears.

Rachel is an inspiration and we hope the surgery goes well and look forward to seeing her back on the track next season.

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