European Athletics U20 Championships Who to watch today

First up is Dundalk St. Gerard’s Kate O’ Connor (M O’Connor/ L Kerr/ T Reynolds) who will be in the 100m hurdles starting blocks at 09.30am (our time) for the start of her Heptathlon competition. Kate, our Irish Senior Women’s Heptathlon record holder with 5881 points, is currently ranked 3rd in Europe and will be looking to get off to a good start this morning.  High Jump will be her second event of the day and is due to begin at 10.30am.

Next Northern Ireland athlete to perform will be James Kelly (John Kelly) from Finn Valley. James goes in the Shot Put qualifying rounds at 12.00noon before Davicia Patterson (Ian Neely) of Beechmount AC  lines up for the 400m qualifiers at 12.20pm. Davicia is also ranked 3rd with a time of 52.57. She will hope to qualify in the third heat where her stiffest competition could come from Barbara Malikova of the Czech Republic and Alina Luchshava of Belarus whose season’s bests are 52.66 and 52.94 respectively.

The afternoon also promises to be full of action with Kate moving onto the Shot Put at 3.04pm. It will then be the turn of Sommer Lecky (Niall Wilkinson) from Finn Valley, at 4.08pm, who won silver at last year’s World U20 High Jump and is currently ranked 7th. Sommer will go in Group B where her sesaon’s best of 1.86 has been matched by Mariya Kochanova (Authorised Neutral Athlete) and Bára Sajdoková (Czech Republic). Group A has four athletes who have jumped 1.86 or higher this season. The day will be rounded off for Kate O’Connor with the 200m at 5.25pm.

The Irish team also includes Aaron Sexton (North Down AC/ C: Roger Sexton) who goes in the 200m qualifiers tomorrow at 2.15pm and the 4x100m Relay on Sunday. Katie Monteith (City of Lisburn AC/ C: Lyn Fisher) will be part of the women’s 4x100m Relay team on Sunday, while her club mate, Adam Hughes (City of Lisburn/ C: Ian Neely) is due to run in the qualifying rounds of the men’s 4x400m Relay tomorrow as well as Rachel McCann (North Down AC/ C: Michael Roberts) and Davicia Patterson who will go in the women’s 4 X 400m qualifiers.

The timetable and results are available here:
https://www.european-athletics.org/competitions/european-athletics-u20-championships/2019/schedules-results/

The championships will be streamed live on the European Athletics website here and coverage will also be shown on Eurosport.

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 *Please note times given above are BST.