Chronicle 687

62 ST EDWARD’S CHRONICLE

Athletics By Becky Drury, Head of Athletics

Horrace Marshall, Ella Walkinshaw and Dare Fadhunsi

raising their personal bests to 1.50m which is now the height of the junior and inter girls’ school records. Toros Esen has been committed to improvement all season, training around GCSE revision, and at the County Schools’ Championships he broke the inter boys’ javelin record by nearly three metres, placing second. His throw of 44.76m broke the previous school record of 41.95m, set by Tom Letch in 2011. The previous school records stood for a long time and the new ones will last for a while, but next season there will be further improvements and they may be broken. What will endure are the memories of the season. There were many contenders for the Athletics coaches’ ‘Highlight of the Season’ award. The senior boys winning gold at the Radley Multi-Events Championship was one such highlight – Max Casey, Kai Wilkinson, Ronan Mulji and Hamish Miller-Edge all performed superbly across the eight events and relay to beat Eton, Radley, Abingdon, Bradfield and others. The Radley Relays will be another lasting memory, with the Senior Boys’ team, led by captains Kit Heffer and Walt Moore, winning the 4x400m relay,

At our Gaudy Prizegiving this year I listened to Chris Jones, the Chair of Governors, speak about the values by which Malcom Oxley lived his life – a desire to learn and improve, to perform, and the importance of things which last and of being earnest. As I listened, I thought about the Athletics team and the season that had just concluded. There have been stellar performances throughout the Summer Term, including the brilliance of Reme Abebe in lowering Brume Otubu’s 2013 junior boy 100m and 200m school records to 11.19s and 23.7s, and Florence Williams’s courageous run in the Senior Boys’ 1500m races at Marlborough, lowering her own school record by two seconds. The Athletics Club has shown a desire to improve and learn throughout the season and we have placed huge emphasis on personal bests over ‘podium’ places. The athletes don’t have to be the best, although of course that is always worthy of celebration, but we encourage them to be the best version of themselves. Julia Dann (junior girls) and Xanthe Docherty (inter girls) demonstrated this as they repeatedly broke each other’s, and then their own high jump records, both

Jack Nelson