2020 will certainly go down as the most disastrous year in athletics history.
Even during the War years, which I can remember, encouragement was given to organisations to promote sporting events including athletics at many impossible venues and where the military were stationed, like Glynde House (Army) and Lancing College, who had a grass track, (Navy) and Lewes, not the Dripping Pan but the problem then was getting enough fit adults to compete.
One of our problems this year was social distancing, and this ruled out all group running, which decimated the end of the Cross country season and virtually obliterated the track season.
However, thanks to the tremendous efforts of a few, there were some local competition opportunities. Gavin Stephens organised several track meetings at Worthing. Pat Apantaku organised a Field Events festival, Kate Matthews, Melanie Anning and Peter Kennedy put on the 'Martin Etchells Memorial' meeting, in October, helped by the kind loan of the Lewes AC track, and Crawley AC held a closed club event at K2.
These efforts have enabled me, with the help of Melanie Anning, to produce a Rankings list, albeit not full, for 2020.
I am conscious that in future years these will be just 2020 Rankings lists and to enable us to retain consistency and standards many are not full lists of competitors. I have used the last performance rankings in 2019 to guide how deep we should make this year's.
I have accommodated indoor performances, and these are in order, in italic font and I hope that this meets approval.
As usual, I ask that if you find errors or missing performances, please contact me at reghook@ntlworld.com for checking.
Crawley's Mame Sow became the first Sussex woman to better 13 metres in the triple jump. Tom Evans (half marathon), Under 20s Almi Nerurkar (3000m) and Elizabeth Korczak (javelin), U17 Cleo Tomlinson (long jump) and U15 Dulcie Yelling (javelin) all broke Sussex records.
I hope that time will permit in the early weeks of 2021 to bring the All-time rankings up to date again.
The 2020 lists are now on the County Rankings page.