British championship medallist Gareth Winter competing in the shot put at Aberdare on Saturday. Pic: Owen Morgan.

Harrison Walsh Learns How To Fetch – As Well As Throw – As Athletics Returns To Wales

Welsh athletes returned to competition within Wales for the first time this weekend, but it was far from business as usual. Owen Morgan braved the rain in order the enter athletics’ brave new world.

It’s not every day you see a World Championship class athlete retrieving his own discus after hurling it more than 50 metres in a competition.

However, this was no ordinary competition. This was Welsh Athletics’ first pilot event on the road back to sporting normality following the Covid-19 lockdown – and it was a hugely welcome success.

Surreal would be the best way to describe the sight of Great Britain international Nick Percy striding out across the field at a deserted Ron Jones Stadium in Aberdare to fetch his discus after each throw.

But the 2017 Doha World Athletics Championships competitor had travelled from the Isle of Wight for the pleasure of fetching and carrying each of his four throws, but more importantly the opportunity to enjoy some much needed competition.

Percy and the other throwers even had to run the gauntlet of some light-hearted and gentle teasing of officials each time they forgot to fetch their discus, shot put, javelin or hammer – a measure designed to cut down any danger of cross contamination.

In truth, the athletes were just grateful and happy to be competing again, even amidst the strict health precautions which also included no spectators, masked officials and implements being doused in sanitiser – in addition to the more orthodox liberal covering of chalk for grip purposes.

Masked officials were on hand to sanitise all the apparatus at Saturday’s pilot throws event in Aberdare. Pic: Owen Morgan.

F44 shot put world record breaker Harrison Walsh, who was competing in the discus, summed up the feeling among the athletes, who assembled on a cool, damp, overcast day in Aberdare.

“It was a bit weird!” said the Disability Sport Wales Athlete.

Despite the unfamiliarity of the situation, Walsh was delighted to be back in action and praised Welsh Athletics for putting on the event. “I’m just so grateful for the opportunity to come here and compete and be supported by such a good organisations as Welsh Athletics and DSW.

“We were doing this competition to see where we are and to help out Welsh Athletics in understanding how they are going to go forward.

“It was a learning experience, learning how to compete again but also under the new restrictions. It was very different to a normal throwing event.”

Remembering to retrieve the discus after each throw took some getting used to, admitted Walsh.

“Obviously we do it in training but in competitions it’s a bit weird. You walk out of the cage and you’ve forgotten to go and get your discus!

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“But it’s so important to have these experiences in these scenarios and to work stuff out for yourself. The next comp will be better and we can build for something this year.”

Walsh, who is a relative newcomer to the sport, admitted not being able to train properly, or compete, had been a challenge while the sport had been suspended due to the pandemic.

“During the actual lockdown it was very difficult,” said Walsh. “I was lucky that I had invested in a gym beforehand so I had equipment to train. But throwing off a footpath into a field . . . there’s all sorts of stuff you have to get used to!

“So it’s been very disjointed, although the distance has been creeping up, I think that’s more to do with me being new to the sport.”

Walsh finished the competition second to Percy, with a throw of 49.45m, down on his best, but understandable considering the restrictions of the past few months.

“When it comes to competition, it shows it has been tough to adapt to this training.

“Not every day is a good day, but every day is a learning day and I’ve learnt a lot from this competition today. What we’ve been throwing in training has been so good I was really excited for it.

“But as competitions do, they tend to kick you in the butt and show you don’t be so cocky.  We’ll build on that and learn what we need to do.

F44 shot put world record breaker Harrison Walsh retrieves his own discus at Aberdare on Saturday. Pic: Owen Morgan.

“We also learn that this is a weird competition structure – there’s no crowd, there were just two warm-up throws and then four throws. I normally throw better in the last two rounds, just because I’ve normally messed up the first two!”

The event was also an opportunity for a return to action for javelin thrower Bethany Moule, for whom the start of lockdown in March had been particularly frustrating.

The Neath Harrier had just been selected to earn her first senior GB vest at the prestigious European Throwing Cup in Portugal when the event fell victim of the restrictions.

“It was the following day it got cancelled,” said Moule, who had just thrown a new PB of 49.71m before her selection.

“It was difficult because I came out at the start of the season and did really well. My winter training definitely paid off and then I felt I should have been on for good throws after that, especially if I had have gone away to compete for GB. It just sucks, really!”

However, she managed to continue training as best she could during lockdown. “It hasn’t been awful, I’ve just been trying to make the most of things.

“I’ve got a little garage gym with a little bit of weights and stuff. I’ve only been back on the track for about a month, but it’s been ok.

“It was tricky because I didn’t get to see my coach at all until about a month ago. I wasn’t able to throw javelins, I was throwing balls and stuff on the local field – that was as far as it went in terms of throwing.”

Neath’s Bethany Moule, who was robbed of a GB vest by Covid-19. Pic: Owen Morgan

Welsh Athletics’ national throws lead Ryan Spencer-Jones, was particularly happy to see some of the country’s top athletes back in action.

The former Welsh Commonwealth Games athlete said: “Obviously for the throwers it’s been hard because all of the facilities have been locked down, which was right, of course.

“But this first competition back has gone really well, it’s just given the opportunity for some of our young throwers to get out there and have a go and see where they are at.

“And next week, with the junior event, it gives our Welsh athletes the opportunity to compete and have that 2020 season.

“With the more technical events, whether that’s throws or jumps, or hurdles, or anything like that, they haven’t had the chance to train because you can’t recreate that environment with the circles or the cages, like endurance runners can out in the parks and on the roads.

“So it has been a difficult three or four month period for all our throwers across Wales. Hopefully, now the light at the end of the tunnel is here with these competitions going on. So it’s looking good.

“Throws in Wales has had a good, rich history with people going to the Olympics and Commonwealth medals, so people like Jac (Palmer) and Osian (Jones) are among our next batch going through.

“I’m excited to see what they can do coming into Birmingham and we’ve obviously got a group of young athletes coming through as well.

Masked officials marking out the field at Saturday’s pilot throws event. Pic: Owen Morgan.

“It’s important to keep their development going. 2020 is just a speed bump in the progress. But there are an exciting couple of years ahead. It’s a six year plan, it’s not four years, we’ve got to look ahead towards 2026 and beyond.”

Saturday’s event, and the pilot track event scheduled for Swansea the following day, are huge steps forward on Welsh athletics’ journey back to something approaching normality following lockdown.

The event wasn’t just a learning experience and a chance to get back into the swing of things for the athletes, but also the organisers and officials, without whom no competition can ever take place.

They also had to get used to implementing the new restrictions introduced to ensure the sport can continue its return as safely as possible.

Welsh Athletics head of competitions Rhiannon Linnington-Payne and her team had worked tirelessly to plan and organise this weekend’s events.

Speaking at the throws event, Linnington-Payne said: “It’s been a strange one to organise, with all the new restrictions that are in place, it’s taken everyone across all the all the four countries a while to figure out how we can work within them.

“I’m really confident that after today, and after tomorrow, that we can push forward and get some more events up and running.”

 

Linnington-Payne was delighted to attract such a high quality field including the likes of Percy, Walsh and Moule, along with Welsh multiple British Championship shot put medallist Gareth Winter and Commonwealth Games competitors Curtis Matthews and Rebecca Chapman, as well as several athletes.

“We’ve had such great line-ups,” she said. “It’s really exciting for me to pull these fields together for our first events of the year. I know a lot of the athletes have had the challenge of not being able to train.

“Competitions have been filling up really quickly so I think everyone is really grateful for the opportunity to compete when they can.”

Linnington-Payne said the same was equally true for athletics officials in Wales.

“So many of the officials today haven’t officiated all summer and there are a few of them going to the British Championships in a few week’s time, so they have been really grateful for the opportunity to bust the rust as well as the athletes and get back up to where they need to be for those televised meetings.”

Linnington-Payne, who is also due to compete at the British Championships over 400m, said the logistics of organising the pilot competitions had been a challenge.

“I’ve said so many times, for us,  the actual events are easy to deliver, it’s everything that sits behind it.

Rhiannon Linington-Payne.

“All the extra measures that need to be in place to make everything run as smoothly as possible, the QR codes for the track and trace, the additional one way systems, making sure all the sanitisers are in place, making sure you think really carefully about where touch points would normally be between individuals and minimising them, or cutting them out completely.

“We’ve worked really closely with Sue (Maughan), our field referee today, to look at how it would work with athletes collecting their own implements.

“It’s been quite easy to do today because we’ve got relatively small numbers but we’re hopefully going to get feedback from the athletes about how they found it as well and utilise that to move our competitions forward.”

Asked what the particular challenges for the officials had been, field referee Sue Maughan said: “It’s trying to think of what are the cross contamination areas.

“Ultimately, we wanted to make sure all the athletes and officials were safe in that environment.

“Also, we’re working with Seiko today, they have the experience of using the EDM (Electronic Distance Measurement) machines. We know they are completely safe, so we are working alongside them.

“One of the challenges we’ve got today, which we are testing, is that we are getting the athletes to collect their implements, which obviously they don’t usually do.

“So, a personal challenge quite a few of the officials are finding is that when something is thrown, they are automatically going to want to collect it. It’s a new environment for us all.

 

“We’re getting the athletes to collect them and they are keeping control of their own implement throughout the competition, so they know it’s safe and we know it’s safe because only that athlete is using it.

“I’m going to be field referee at the British Championships, fingers crossed that it goes ahead at the beginning of September. There are going to be all the new protocols for that, so it’s going to be a challenge for quite a few of the officials.”

You can find full results from Saturday’s event on the Welsh Athletics website.

 

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