That’s the way of worlds, son — it’s a souped-up all-comers meet
Jay Stone of Australia won two gold medals at Daegu. Nice! Congrats. But don’t expect his local paper to provide details. Like how old he is, or what his times were. Trivial stuff. But Jay is a great illustration of the all-comers-meet nature of worlds. It’s not his fault that his M35 group was weak. He won the 200 in 22.68 and the 400 in 50.25. But those marks would have gotten third and second in the M40 2 and 4, respectively. “For the experienced short-distance runner, he entered the event as a rookie, having never raced on an indoor track before,” the story says, and quoted Jay: “It was very different, I hadn’t done any indoor racing before, so it was something completely new for me. I did have the opportunity to sneak on to the track for a very light training session the day I arrived. And that was invaluable because I had my 200 metre heat the next day and otherwise I would have gone in completely blind.”
Later, he says: “One of the most different things was starting in the blocks. Crouching down in starting blocks, normally you doing that on very level ground but here we were starting on the side of the bank so you are leaning over and trying to do a block start on a weird angle.”
He wins for honesty, though. Hope to see him again on the world stage.
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Ken, since you are short on details about Jay, I can provide a few. Jay hails from deep in the bush of NSW, Armidale, to be precise. He is a senior IT type at the University there, and on the side organizes the local Athletic Club…which always seem to be punching above their weight. Amazingly, Jay,s track career began rather late, basically after college. He,s represented Australia internationally, and has been one of their top sprinters and jumpers for the last 15 years.
Finally I,m tickled to report, in 2003, while working in Armidale, the programmer in the next cubicle wandered by and suggested that I might give Athletic a try. Yes, that was Jay, and track and field has been my personal “identity” ever since.
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