Indoors

Nenagh, Saturday February 13th – We had one Sportsworld athlete (Packie Enright) at the universities indoor track & field championships at the weekend )www.iuaa.org). Representing the college he graduated from in October (the DIT) as a one year down, he elected to avoid the stiff competition at the running events and partake in the combined events; consisting of 5 events in which he had absolutely no prior experience. His reason for doing this is because last year, they were only two competitiors at the pentathlon, so Enright saw it as a chance to score some points for the college by just turning up. However his cunning plan backfired, and this year it was well populated with genuine combined eventers and all year round track athletes. As a sport, combined events is certainly no soft touch; it ranks up there with the toughest of them. It’s for powerfully built people that usually don’t have the talent to be victorious at one of the single events. Training for it is like a full time job – Moscow 80 & LA 84 decathlon champion Daley Thompson used to spend his day at the track, and I’m sure Jessica Ennis does the same. Thankfully it didn’t drag onto two days or more like it usually does. The first event for Enright was the high jump, and three failures at the minimum opening height of 1.30m meant that he’d no points bagged; in fact the only thing he was going away with was a sliced lower back and metal burn from the outdated aluminium bar. The thing was that if he scissor kicked it he would probably have got over, but he tried a pathetic attempt at a Fosbury flop [...]