Town Sunk By Impressive Blues
Last week saw a young City of Oxford Swimming Club Team take on the Blues Team to decide the fate of this year's Town v Gown competition. The event was aimed at providing a warm up for the Varsity Match, which is being held on Saturday 16th February in Reading, and resulted in a number of promising swims from both teams.
Although we won the overall competition by a score of 90-80, and so secured bragging rights for the rest of the year, the Townies certainly held their own. They will no doubt be keenly anticipating next year's event, and with it their chance to improve on their record of a single win in 11 attempts at this event.
The best swim of the day came from Sarah Boyd (LMH and ex-GB Junior) who smashed the Blues time over 100m backstroke by over two seconds with a time of 1.08.09. Encouragingly for the team, though, this was still a long way off her own personal best time, which was set before coming to Oxford.
Amy Davies also swam strongly in the 200m freestyle, recording a time of 2.17.44, enough to win comfortably her race by a couple of body-lengths, but just missing out on her Blues time.
There were a number of exciting races for the men, most notably in the 4 by 50m medley relay and the 400m freestyle.
In the 400, Ben Herbert (Merton and OUSC President) started strongly and led the race for almost its entirety. Going into the last hundred metres, two City swimmers started making their moves and the race came down to a spectacular sprint finish. Dave Denny (COSC and ex-Gown swimmer) just got the advantage over the last few metres, with Herbert coming second, and City's promising James Warren a close third - only half a second separating the three swimmers.
Amazingly the medley relay was even closer. Two very balanced teams battled for victory, with strong swims coming from Andrew Roberts (Christ Church) and Karl Wood (Oriel). The race came down to the last leg with myself racing James Dedrick. Neither of us could break away and the race went right down to the wire, with COSC Coach Michael Wright deciding (contentiously) that James had touched just ahead of me to win the race for the town in a time of 1.58.44.
With Varsity approaching soon, the very strong Cambridge team will no doubt be favourites to take the title in both the men's and women's event, but depending on how the final week of preparation goes for us, they could be in for more of a race than they bargained for.
14th Feb 2002