The Clonliffe men dominated today’s Dublin cross country championships held at the National Sports Campus in Abbottstown to retain the title and bring home the Padraig Keane cup for the 8th successive year.
It was a beautiful autumnal day with warm sunshine and perfect underfoot conditions. The Clonliffe men were out in force with the biggest team, by far, lining up for the start of the 5 lap race adding up to a total of 7500m. After pretty pedestrian opening lap the black and amber were all gathered at the front and was only on the 2nd lap that the pace increased with DSD’s Paul O’Donnell very much to the fore, as the race wore on O’Donnell moved clear of the Clonliffe pack to take the win with Colm Rooney leading the charge in 2nd, and with Fintan Kerins 3rd, Ian Guiden 4th and Ben Guiden 6th the team result was never in doubt, Clonliffe winning on 15 points with DSD 2nd on 27 and Rathfarnham 3rd on 73.
Overall encouraging performances from the entire squad: Tom Breslin was 10th, Malcolm Kiplagat 11th, Sergiu Ciobanu 14th, Jack Doyle 16th, Cathal McHale 23rd, Karl Nolan 27th, Damien Prendergast 29th, Mark McDonald 32nd, Billy Stafford 39th, Niall Sherlock 44th, Simon Caer 47th and Sean Doran 60th.
With the national senior cross-country at the same venue in 3 weeks time there was also an encouraging performance at the San Sebastian International cross country today by Efrem Gidey who took 4th place.
In all it was a very good day in Abbottstown for Clonliffe with several sets of juvenile medals won in the juvenile ranks. (Separate report to follow).
