Double Hungarian Olympian Gyula Dudas made his debut on the Sussex Race walking scene at the weekend when he finished second in the Steyning Athletic Club’s “Open” 15km road walk.
Dudas who raced in both the 2000 and 2004 Olympics has been living in Brighton for the past decade and his walking has been restricted to training and walking the Brighton Marathon for the past two years.
He met his match however in the person of super vet Ian Richards M65 who has been ruling the roost in Sussex for several years.
Conditions were not good with light rain turning to heavy rain, which caused flooding and a strong South wind in the walkers faces on the return journey. All but one of the walkers were slower on the second half of the race.
Richards led the race from early on and eventually won by eight minutes in 77:14 to 85:44 for Dudas, who impressed the judges with another Steyning walker, Trevor Jones clocking 95:47 in third place.
Fiona Bishop from Aldershot was the first woman to finish clocking 1:03:47 to Steyning’s Anne Jones who clocked 1:05:01s.
London Indoor Open.
There were some sparkling performances by Sussex athletes at the Annual London Indoor Games at Lee Valley at the weekend.
The emphasis was very much on performances rather than competition, particularly in the 60m sprint where there were 16 senior races.
In round one Toby Harries (Brighton Phoenix) won race four in 6.86s but was squeezed into third place in race two of the second round in the same time.
In the U20 60m Crawley’s Rhys Turner won his first round in 7.09s and improved that to 7.00s in the second round, where he placed seventh.
Both Brighton & Hove’s Amber Anning and Crawley’s Holly Turner returned fast times in their 400 metre events. Turner finished second in 55.01s in her race while in the U20 event Anning clocked 54.77s for her indoor 400m debut which was faster than all but one senior time.
Sam Heawood (Crawley) won the shot putt with 15.72m while there was a third place in the 800m in 1:53.24s for Spencer Thomas (Phoenix) with club mate Finley Bigg clocked 1:55.07s in fifth place while Brighton & Hove’s Cameron Fillery collected two second places in the 60m hurdles with a best time of 8.07s.
Tom French, the Sussex long jump record holder, topped the seven metre mark leaping 7.08m for third place.
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