British Masters Indoor Track & Field & Winter Throws Championships
Lee Valley Athletics Complex, Enfield
Saturday 11th & Sunday 12th March 2017
Kingston upon Hull AC’s veteran thrower John Twiddle won a hat trick of Gold Medals at the British Masters Indoor Track & Field and Winter Throws Championships. John travelled down to the Lee Valley Athletics Centre in Enfield with 600 other athletes from around the UK to take part in the championships which took part over two days. Having struggled with a knee injury in the latter part of 2016 this event marked John’s return to the competitive arena.
His first event was the M45 discus on Saturdays opening day of competition where he started the event as favourite, a 32 metre throw in the first round was a great confidence booster before extending out to a 3rd round throw of 33.88 metres to take the gold medal.
Day two’s events started at 10am on Sunday morning with the Hammer competition. After a foul in the first round with the hammer hitting the cage John opted for a safe throw of 36 metres in round two before then sending out the 16lb hammer to a winning distance of 38.57 metres in round three to secure a second gold medal of the weekend.
The indoor shot competition was the next event on the agenda and after two rounds John lay in 3rd place with 11.30 metres, once again his best throw came in the 3rd round with an 11.78 metre effort which moved up into 2nd place. He was unable to better Andy Lewis’ 12.40 metre throw and had to settle for the silver medal.
The final event of the weekends throwing competitions was the 35lb weight throw and this turned out to be a very closely fought competition between John and Andrew Sheerin of Bournemouth AC. John took an early lead but slipped into second place before finally achieving a throw of 10.76 metres to win the title by a margin of just 6 centimetres and take his third gold medal of the Championships.
John is back in full training with Hull the Hammer Squad down at Costello preparing for another season of competition with the clubs senior team in the North of England Track & Field League where the opening match of the 2017 campaign takes the team to Rotherham on Saturday the 6th of May.
