I was recently was privileged enough to experience and be part of a great sporting event that I'm going to share with you all.
The UK School Games is a multi-sport event for the UK's best athletes of school age. The 2011 UK School Games consisted of 10 sports including Athletics, Badminton, Cycling, Fencing, Gymnastics, Hockey, Judo, Rugby Sevens, Swimming, Table Tennis, Volleyball and Wheelchair Basketball. Overall there are 1600 athletes involved competing in the Games. The sport competitions are spread out over 4 days with different sports competing on different days. The UK School Games are almost a smaller scale version of the Commonwealth Games, Paralympic Games and Olympic Games. It gives all the young athletes involved a feel of what those Games would feel like and is very motivational to all the athletes involved, to keep on going and working hard to make it to the top level in their sport.
The Athletics competition was made up of 8 teams, Team Bristol, Team London, Team Birmingham, Team Gateshead, Team Manchester, Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland. I was part of Team Bristol which was made up of athletes from the South West and 3 Counties from the South East. I was taken to run in part of the 4x100m relay team.
The Games was from the 1st September to the 4th September 2011 in Sheffield. On the 1st September, all the athletes arrived at the Athletes village which was at Sheffield University. Then on that evening, the opening ceremony of the Games was held, which consisted of speeches from Jason Gardener and the Games were declared open by Ellie Simmonds (paralympic swimmer). All the athletes from the different sports were introduced and there was entertainment from local Sheffield people as well as a performance from an urban gymnastic group called Cirque Bijou.
The actual Athletics competition wasn't taking place until the 3rd-4th September so on the 2nd September, all athletes were taken to the Don Valley Stadium, where every athlete was allocated training time to get in last minute training and most importantly for me and my relay squad to get some relay practice done, as we had never practiced with each other before. Every team had an anti-drug doping presentation given to them; it was very interesting and gave a shock to everyone that even drugs like Sudafed were a substance you could get banned for. They gave us information on how to check if certain drugs or supplements were banned, which is definitely going to come in useful when making sure I don't put any banned substances in my body. On the evenings there was quite a bit to do at the Athletes Village. They had an athlete’s lounge which had computers, pool table, Nintendo Wii's and even a diary room like Big Brother! I met so many new people alongside the people I already knew and everyone was friendly and got on with each other.
Saturday 3rd September was race day for me and the relay was the last event of the day. I watched some fantastic performances throughout the day and saw loads of medals being won, especially by my team. The rest of my relay team and I warmed up together, practiced some last minute change over’s and all psyched each other up. We all knew that if we could perfect the change over’s we had a chance of medalling. I was running the first leg, so it was down to me to get a good start and get us away well. I had a great run gaining ground on the runners outside of me and had an excellent change over with my team mate Ronnie Wells. He then flew down the back straight, to hand it over to Ben Pearson, who then handed it to our anchor man Adam Thomas, who had recently won silver in the 100m earlier in the day. It was all close when he received it but Birmingham were ahead, he stormed down the back straight and caught up immensely with the Birmingham guy and brought us home to win a silver medal. It was a fantastic team effort and we done ourselves proud and achieved what we set out to do. It was great to win a medal and get up on the podium in front of everyone else and it has definitely motivated me to train harder to get on the podium at the big competitions much more! Team Bristol's atmosphere on the Athletes Village that night was amazing as we were joint 1st with Team London and we had all done so well as a team that day.
Sunday 4th September was the last day of the competition and it brought more success for Team Bristol and there were some outstanding performances throughout the day. Overall Team Bristol finished 3rd behind Team London and Gateshead which was a great achievement. Sadly I had to miss the closing ceremony due to my flight back to Bristol being whilst it was going on.
But as a whole I had the time of my life at UK School Games and it couldn't have been any better. Winning a silver medal in the relay is definitely one of the highlights, if not the highlight of my season. I met a load of new people and made some great friends, not only from Athletics but from the other sports also. The whole event has inspired me and has made me much more determined to want to make it as a professional athlete, so those kinds of events will be much more common, as they are fantastic and you have an amazing time. I am grateful I got selected to compete there as I know there were loads of people who wanted to compete there too but just missed out on qualification. UK School Games is definitely the best competition I've been to and winning a silver medal topped the whole experience off!
