A new peak for Spencer Swim Team. June 2019
Club Coach, Stephen Baker reports
“The South London Swimming Club Mid-Summer relays have been tagged for many years now and we have as a club played our part. It’s effectively 4 swimmers swimming 4 x 100 each in order.
Over the past couple of years, we have upped our game and this year we hit a new high by winning the gold medal at all three senior age groups. The only one we didn’t compete in was the under 100 – we could have but are only allowed to enter three teams.
There is of course always more devil in the detail.
The three teams were called:
Spencer Youf 100-150 Georgina Quayle, Sue Swaine, Olivier Geleoc, Rob Tate.
Spencer Stewarts 151 – 200 Mel Thomas, Jess Campbell, Laura Mason, James Draper
Spencer Oldies 201 plus Lisa Hibberd, Ed Hill, Willem Heskes, Stephen Baker
The competition amongst the 40 teams was really good and Spencer did their best to make it a fight all round.
The young team were overall fastest team with a time of 18.23, beating even the first placed team in the under 100-year category. This is a fabulous time of 68.9 average 100 yards. Their winning margin in their age category was 1 minute and 16 seconds, so over a length. A fabulous performance.
The second age group made life more interesting, winning in a time of 20.35, 16 seconds ahead of the second placed home team and the following three teams, places 2-4 were only separated by 3 seconds. A fantastically close race for such an event.
The oldies named Goldies decided that following their 2018 victory an improvement was required and won in 20.32 a winning margin of 1 minute and 15 seconds.
However, the detail here is that they managed to beat the younger Spencer team by 3 seconds. Life in the old ones yet!!!
The last length must have been really exciting as no fewer than 7 team finished between 20.32 and 20.59 with 4 finishing within 8 seconds of each other.
For the record, the young team won out of 11 teams, the middle group out of 18 and the older team out of 7, but without rubbing it in would have won the middle group as well, so oldies we got the fifth fastest time out or 40 teams including the under 100 team., so very well done indeed.
Just to complete the stats, the young teams time was almost the same as last year with the oldies posting an improvement of 18 seconds.
Enough stats for one night.
Well done everyone. Here’s to a double treble in 2020!!!!”
Steve
