Weekend Round-Up

This weekend we had Thunderbirds in action at the UBC Invitational on Friday 3rd April, as well as Rachel Cliff in the Stanford Invitational. Cliff ran a huge personal best in the 5000m of 15:33.15, bettering her previous best by 13 seconds! Big congratulations to Rachel for such a great start to the season.

At the UBC Invitational we had a number of athletes competing in the less than perfect conditions. The BC weather brought us rain, wind and cool conditions for the competition to start of the outdoor season in typical fashion. On the men’s side, a highlight was Michael Aono in the 200m. The 11th grader ran a speedy 21.45 to come first in his race, beating a handful of university athletes. Also in the 200m was Felix Rankin, running 22.65,  Matthew Chan in 23.66, and Yuri Suzuki in 23.71. These boys also competed in the 100m with a time of 11.06 for Rankin, 11.30 for Chan and 11.49 for Suzuki. Thunderbird Yuri Suzuki had a busy day as he also jumped 6.47 in the men’s long jump. Finally, we had Ethan Strome in the 400hurdles with a time of 57.92.

On the female Thunderbird side we had two girls in the women’s 100m. Michelle Yee ran 13.36 and Chantel Van Hombeeck ran 13.49. We had many girls in the field jump events as Michelle Yee also competed in the triple jump, with a jump of 10.31. In the long jump Selena Zhu finished with a leap of 5.27, and in the high jump Gabrielle Aquilini jumped 1.60m , only narrowly missing out on 1.63m.

A great start to the outdoor season for many of our athletes, hopefully the next meet at home sees some sunshine!