Arena 80 ac the Harvey Curtis Cup triple team champions

Brazil ’82 – Barcelona – Mercedes – The All Blacks and now Arena 80 as one of the team greats, well ok I might be just getting carried away here, but what the heck we are the HCC team champions again. What a club, what a team, what a year, what the hell, what comes next…
You don’t win a trophy for ages and then three come along at once. So it’s now official and Arena 80 ac are crowned the best team in Sussex for a third year running (can you see what I did there) and we now get to keep the trophy.
Our goal this year was to focus on the Harvey Curtis Cup to see if we could retain it and wow how we did retain it, it’s all wrapped up with one race to spare.
It was a difficult start by Arena’s own standards, with some dodgy weather hampering runners and Arena only placing 2nd after the Chichester 10k so we didn’t quite have it all our own way. However Arena got their groove back on and from race 2 Arena dominated the team standings claiming 1st in every race onwards. There is of course one more race remaining, which is the Brighton 10k In November, and many of our athletes are still running for points for their own individual standings.
When you look at the tables though, it really does look so healthy for Arena 80 with many of our athletes showing in the table.
In the men’s table, it’s wonderful to see an Arena 80 name right up there with the best of them as Richard Clayton, who has had a phenomenal year, is sitting in 3rd spot. Others showing in the top 10 also include Aled Anderson 6th and Anthony Snelling 9th. In fact of the top 16 men Arena are showing no less than 8 athletes making up 50% of the top 16.
The women who have again shown so much dominance this year, have two in the top 3 with Maisie Trafford leading the way and Tara Shanahan in a very strong 3rd position. Arena hold 6 of the top 10 places, or drilling down further, 10 of the top 15 places, now that’s dominance.
In the Men’s masters Arena have 3 in the top 7 with Dan Vaughan once again featuring as best placed man. I would also like to mention Steve McNealy, currently 6th, who has had a magnificent years running and good to see the class finally coming out of retirement to show what he can truly deliver. TJ Derangi is 7th and what a great year he has had too.
The women’s Masters are again dominated by the blue vest of Arena 80 and no wonder so many women want to join our club as we truly do have the strongest women’s team in Sussex.
Leading the way here is Tara Shanahan who has been very solid all year and truly magnificent in all of her races. In 2nd place is the other team captain Dani Tarleton who seems to go very much under the radar and yet produces so much class and big results. Soulla and Katherine are 4th and 5th respectively to make up the top 5. Also featuring in the top 10 are Caroline Wood, Nicky Yeates, Isobel Muir and Sue Brumwell, so lovely to see a couple of new Arena names for the 2018 season that haven’t featured for a while.
For the moment let’s just bask in the glory of being the best team in Sussex once again and thank you to everyone in the club who ran, trained, captained, supported, coached, presidented and of course Bob Page for getting us all here, you all played your part in winning the trophy again and making Arena such a great club to be a part of.
For the full table standings go to; http://sussexrrc.co.uk/series-standings/
The views expressed in this post are those of the web admin team only and not those of Arena 80 ac.
Champions with a champion!