Raising the bar – to a new 'lap record'!

Yes, I know I said after the first entry on this blog that I would be focussing on the athletes who are going to the Games rather than those who aren’t – but I am going to break that promise already! The only reason the athlete in question isn’t going to Aland is that she is still a year short of reaching the minimum age for competing in the athletics competition, which is 15.

High jumper Reagan Dee has had a remarkable year. At the start of the 2008 season the IOM women’s High Jump record stood at 1.61m and was jointly held by Cheryl Done (set in 1986) and 2009 Island Games team member Hollie Bass (set in 2002). Reagan jumped 1.62m in the Inter Schools Championships at the NSC last May to break the record at the age of 13 - has any other athlete ever held an outright IOM athletics record at such a young age? I very much doubt it.

Already this season Reagan has quite literally raised the bar by upping this record on two further occasions. She jumped 1.65m in the early-season Manx Harriers Open Meeting at the NSC, and then last Saturday she won the English Northern Counties Championship at Gateshead with a brilliant clearance of 1.67m. Just 24 hours later, after a long road journey and a night spent on the overnight ferry back home, she cleared 1.66m in the IOM Track & Field Championships at the NSC on Sunday afternoon.

I was standing at the High Jump area during the Open Meeting in April, and Reagan was a joy to watch. She is very tall with a natural spring, and makes it all look so easy – as top-class performers usually do. She seems to have a relaxed and laid-back attitude to competition, and certainly doesn’t appear to think that she is a star even if the rest of us do! I know nothing about the technical aspect of high jumping, but those who do all think she has a great future. Let’s hope that what she has achieved so far is just the start.

For most of Sunday afternoon, I found myself in the announcer’s box at the NSC during the Championships. Not a role that comes naturally to me, but Andy Fox was unavailable after the first hour or so, and nobody else fancied it. Of course, the problem with speaking ‘live on air’ is that there is always the potential for unwittingly saying something absolutely ridiculous, and unlike typing a blog entry you can’t delete anything or hit the ‘undo’ button!

However, there’s nothing too difficult about reading out results and announcing medal ceremonies, and everything was going swimmingly – until it got to the presentation for the Under 15 Girls High Jump. Clearly, Reagan’s performances over the weekend deserved a bit more recognition than just being called up to get her medal, so I informed the assembled Manx athletics public that she had won the Northern Counties Championship the previous day with a clearance of 1.67m. Unfortunately, in the next breath I then added that this was ‘a new outright lap record for the Women’s High Jump’!

My only excuse for that piece of abject nonsense is that the TT is just around the corner and I must already have half a mind on that! I wonder if John McGuinness or any of the other road racing stars will ‘raise the bar’ with their performances on the TT Course over the next couple of weeks?