Ben Waterman ran a season’s best of 1:48.68 to win the 800m at this year’s Loughborough International match. Nick Landeau also competed for the club, finishing second in the guest 1500m in a personal best time of 3:49.67.
Described as “the athletics season’s traditional curtain raiser”, the match saw Loughborough students taking on teams from England, Wales, Ireland, GB & NI Juniors, and British Universities.
Ben’s coach Steve Mann said they had applied for the England place, but it had already been offered to Spencer Thomas of Brighton. Luckily, Ben was given a guest place in the race, and in a close finish, he beat the England athlete by three-hundreds of a second. Steve explained that the race plan was to sit and kick from 150m out, and the tactic evidently worked!
Six days later, Ben and Nick were back in action at the Oordegem-Lede meeting in Belgium, where Ben ran almost as quickly again. Nick also competed over 800m, setting another PB.
You can read a full write-up of the Loughborough match on pages 38-40 of this week’s Athletics Weekly.
Full results are on power of 10 both of the Loughborough match and the Oordegem-Lede meeting.