THE KING ISN’T DEAD – LONG LIVE THE KING

Forget football – that is won by oil money. Forget F1 – they make the rules up as they go along. Forget Rugby – The All Blacks always win that – and the Olympics – The Chinese have that in the bag. You want real competition…look no further…..

Alek Walker has finally emerged triumphant after a relentless 8 month struggle with Tom Crabtree over the WRR 2023 off road race series. There was only one question on everyone lips in the Beesley Green community centre at 8:30am on a humid Sunday morning in late September – could Tom somehow gain a low enough score to knock Alek off his perch? All he needed was a top 10 finish and for about 300 runners to turn up. Well he got 10th place, but with only 239 runners in the race his score of 0.042 wasn’t quite low enough to make the difference. Even though he won the battle with Alek, it wasn’t quite good enough to win the war, and Alek’s cumulative score of 0.35 has made him the champion.

Alek set the bar high early on, and by May already had his best 3 trail races, all finishing within the top 3% in them all. Not to be outdone, Tom, like a well seasoned poker player, matched his hand then slightly bettered it. It was all to play for on the fells. Aleks “short cut” certainly helped him at Wardle Skyline, but was never ruled out by VAR, so the result stood. Tom came top 11% or better in all his fell races, so Alek still had to put it in on one of his other races. That race turned out to be Golf Ball, on an summer evening so wet and dull you just wanted to turn up, tune out and get through it. Not only did Alek get through it, he managed to finish within the top 10% of the field and substantially reduce his overall score and place one hand on the title. This was the result that may have been a step too far for Tom.

Further down the table, Carl Groome beat Steve Myerscough into third place following his score at Worlsley, Ian Hogg who had a great season and made great improvements on last season came first male under 35, newcomers Kay Twist and Rob Dansons made great debut seasons finishing first woman and first male vet 55 respectively. Sally Deacon used the last race to leap frog Kirsty Holland into ladies runner up and leaving Kirsty with the female under 35 title.

The final results:

Alek 0.35, Tom 0.37, Carl 1.21, Steve 1.24, Ian 2.39, Kay 3.14, Rob 4.69, Sally 5.17, Kirsty 5.21