ATHLETICS Ireland have named a team of eight for the 45th World Cross-Country Championships in Croatia on March 30.
The team, which will be led by national senior women’s champion Fiona Everard, includes two northern athletes.
Anna Gardiner confirmed her selection last Saturday when she successfully defended her senior girls’ title at the All-Ireland Secondary Schools’ Cross Country Championships. She is joined in the U20 race by Kirsty Maher from the Moy Valley club in Ballina, Mayo.
Bristol-based Séamus Robinson, who does his running on this side of the channel in the colours of City of Derry Spartans, has been selected for the U20 men’s race alongside Waterford AC’s Harry Colbert. Both men were in the Ireland squad that took gold medals at the European Cross Country in Brussels last December.
Everard is rewarded for being a somewhat unexpected winner of the national championships last autumn and the Bandon AC athlete will have support in the senior women’s race from Tullamore Harrier Danielle Donegan.
Fionnuala McCormack had originally indicated she would be available for selection and looked as though she was preparing for the event when she ran the Almond Blossom cross country in Portugal last month, finishing a more than respectable ninth. However, the 39-year-old Wicklow woman will now focus on road races, and having qualified for her fifth successive Olympics, train for the marathon in Paris.
Two Mayo athletes, Ballina AC’s Hugh Armstrong and Moy Valley’s Keelan Kilrehill, will be the Irish representatives in the senior men’s race. Unfortunately, national champion Cormac Dalton is unavailable due to injury as the Mullingar athlete would have undoubtedly benefitted for exposure at this level.
All eight Irish athletes will have their backs to the wall in Belgrade with the event historically dominated by runners from east Africa.
Last year in Bathurst, Australia, all 27 medals on offer, with the exception of three bronze placings, were shared out between Kenya, Ethiopia, and Uganda.
Ireland has not won a medal at the championships since 1998 when Sonia O’Sullivan did the double, taking gold in both the now discontinued short and long course races.
The last team success was in 2002 when O’Sullivan (7th), Ann Keenan-Buckley (10th), Rosemary Ryan (18th) and Maria McCambridge (50th) combined to claim short course medals on home ground at Leopardstown Racecourse.
