ONE of the highlights in the disability sports calendar comes to Coventry this weekend when more than 240 of the country’s finest go for Gold at the National Junior Athletics Championships.
The annual two-day championships take place at the University of Warwick’s athletics track this Saturday and Sunday.
Many elite disabled athletes began their own success at this prestigious event, including Hannah Cockroft, Shelly Woods, Aled Davies and Hollie Arnold whose talent marked them out as potential world-class athletes.
Two Coventry athletes will be gunning for gold with Ben Rowlings set to compete in the u20 T34 200m and 1500m races, while Kare Adenegan, a T34 (Cerebral Palsy) wheelchair racer, is competing from 100m through to 1500m.
Rawlings is already ranked second in the world at 800m, in which he is European record holder and fifth in the world at 200m and 400m and eight in the world at 100m.
While 14-year-old Adenegan is the youngest athlete on Great Britain’s World Class Performance programme and represented GB at the IWAS World Junior championship and at the IAAF Diamond League and IPC Sainsbury Grand Prix in 2014.
The championships is organised by the English Federation of Disability Sport (EFDS) and has a wide range of athletes with different impairments taking part.
“EFDS believes everyone should have a chance to be active, at whatever level they choose to take part,” said Barry Horne, chief executive of EFDS.
“The Typhoo Junior Athletics Championships 2015 is certainly one of my favourite events of the year and we know how much the athletes enjoy it too.
“That’s why it is great to see how many young disabled people will be part of this weekend’s competition.”
The first starting gun will be fired at 10am on Saturday and the last tape broken at 1pm on Sunday, with the two days of competition sandwiching the championship dinner on the Saturday night.
As well as individual medals up for grabs, there is the team championship on offer, with current holders the North East again fielding a very strong team.