National Under-18 Cross-country Championship Results
Thursday, January 28, 2010
Aldrich Lim in action during the 2009 POSB Run for Kids.
Bedok Reservoir, Saturday, January 23, 2010 - Aldrich Lim of Naval Base Secondary School defeated a strong field which included several top junior athletes to become Singapore's new Under-18 cross-country champion at the Singapore Athletic Association (SAA) Cross-Country Championships.
He clocked a time of 17:40 min over the 5km long route and in doing so, Aldrich established himself as a strong contender for the B Division National Schools Championships, which will be held on March 24th.
A year ago, Aldrich was a relative unknown on the local running scene. He first rose to prominence at the 2009 POSB Run for Kids event, where he won the Men's Open 8km road race in an impressive time of 29:12. Never looking back since, Aldrich continued to run well, putting together a string of impressive performances, notably finishing second in the 2009 REAL Run Junior 10km category (35:30) and finishing as the second Singaporean at the 2009 Singapore Marathon 10km Men's Open (35:35).
For all his good performances at long road races, Aldrich had never before been a contender at the national level at the shorter cross country races. Until Saturday, that is.
Starting fast and taking the lead from the gun, Aldrich never relinquished the lead, and bravely ran his opponents into the ground. With the U-18 boys being flagged off together with the U-20, Open and Veteran categories, he did not hesitate to challenge the older, more experienced athletes, and could be seen courageously fighting with the bigger boys all the way to the finish.
Established top juniors T Haarishankar of Singapore Sports School and Zachary Ryan Devaraj of Anglo-Chinese School (Independent) both put up a good fight, but ultimately finished fifth and third respectively.
With the emergence of a strong new challenger, the established order of top juniors will surely be spurred on to train even harder to cope with the new-found threat. The introduction of Aldrich into the already talent-saturated B Division will definitely spice things up even more, making the 2010 National Schools Cross-Country Championships an event not to be missed.
Check back later on RedSports for the results of the 2010 National Schools Cross-Country Championships.
This article was syndicated from Redsports. Story and photos © RedSports.
Post a comment
We welcome you to share your thoughts and comments on the above article. Please be polite and respectful in your interactions with other readers on Schoolbag. If your comment is found to be obscene, contains racial/religious slurs or off-topic, we reserve the right to remove your comment. This is also not a venue for you to harass, abuse, impersonate, or intimidate others, or to sell products/services.