HONOURS SHARED!

It was a blanket finish, the clock didn't stop, and they had to wait an hour for the final result, but Dean Hylton and Brandon Murray both ended medal winners after a thrilling Surrey County 100m senior men's 100 metres final!

Dean Hylton (12) on his way to gold, and Brandon Murray (17) bronze,
in the Surrey County AA 100m senior men's 100m final at Kingston

Blackheath and Bromley's Hylton edged over the line ahead of Herne Hill's Marvin Popoola, with Murray hooked onto their shirt tails.  All three men clocked 10.9 seconds according to the manual timekeepers stacked above the finish line.

Winds have been the curse of early season competitions for Trackspeed1-UK athletes, and the sprints at Kingston's Kingsmeadow stadium were no different.  Wind speeds fluctuated but all the sprints faced a headwind of anything up to and beyond 3 metres per second.

Trackspeed1-UK sprinters Dean Hylton and Brandon
Murray on the medal rostrum in Kingston

With most other squad athletes still recovering from traveling back across the Atlantic from their pre-season training camp barely a week earlier, County duty featured few of the Crystal  Palace-based group.

Calvin Kirstein was outside the medals in the Sussex 100m final in fourth, but was involved in a gold medal performance in the 4x100m relay, where his Eastbourne Rovers quartet set a new club record.  Ishmael Smith-John won silver in the Kent 200m at Ashford despite a gale blowing him backwards in the final.

Twenty-four hours before Hylton and Murray took to the tartan in Kingston, Trackspeed-UK's Cameron Starr took silver in the 200m senior men's final clocking 21.99s amid another swirling wind.  Niclas Baker took bronze in the Middlesex 200m final at Lee Valley - again into a huge headwind - with training partner Jerome Lule in fifth to make it six medals out of eight performances for the squad over the weekend.