For the sixth successive year our Men’s Team has finished in the Top 20 whilst our Ladies have leap frogged up to 48th position, having only made the top 100 for the first time in 2018. Our Men were the highest ranking in both the East Region and Beds County whilst our Ladies were the 2nd highest female team in the County behind South Beds.

The Men’s team achieved 17,722 points, down from the 18,730 they secured in 2018. to finish 9th. Coming 12th out of the 521 Men’s teams was a remarkable achievement not least as two of our team, Graham Powell and Alastair Gibb, had truncated competitive seasons due  to health related issues. Alex Mason attained his best ever points total but just failed to eclipse Graham as our highest scoring individual male. Graham finished 39th nationally with Alex 40th in a competition that saw 2,357 individuals taking part. Whilst Dave Wright was coerced to a certain degree into entering enough events, he gained invaluable team points and in so doing proved to be a mainstay of our Men’s team for the 10th successive year.

Men's Decathlon Results

Beds Ranking 2019	Beds Ranking 2018	Name	Age	Decathlon Points 2019 (No. of races)	Decathlon Points (2018) (No. of races)	GB Ranking 2019	GB Ranking 2018
2	3	Graham Powell	63	5,115 (10)	5,271 (10)	39	23
3	4	Alex Mason	23	5,110 (10)	5,103 (10)	40	30
6	6	Dave Wright	58	3,837 (10)	4,122 (10)	138	103
7	7	Alastair Gibb	59	3,660 (10)	3,921 (10)	160	126
13	11	Colin Mayes	64	2,905 (7)	2,860 (7)	356	308
16	13	John O'Rourke	50	2,660 (10)	2,662 (10)	442	369
21	19	Malcolm Barton	64	2,352 (8)	1,903 (6)	565	759
22	18	Sam Bradley	26	2,210 (10)	2,079 (9)	641	657
28	-	Nathan Bentley	21	1,667 (4)	-	1,014	-
39	31	Ian Norman	50	682 (4)	472 (3)	1,955=	1,970
42	5	Tom Lambert	24	589 (2)	4,234 (10)	2,047	93

 

2019 was definitely a year where our Ladies shone with an equal number of the squad’s females competing . An increased participation in a greater number of competitions, boosted both by an influx of new and hitherto “social” members, saw our Ladies team increase their team points total from 7,792 to 10,980. A total of 1,731 individual ladies and 422 ladies teams took part in the 2019 competition. Karen MacKenzie was once more our highest scoring female, with Sharon Thompson just being edged out of the Club’s top four by some late season swims by Kelly Cooke. Laura Smith and Alice Pinney meanwhile spearheaded our younger intake into the Masters squad.

Ladies Decathlon Results

Beds Ranking 2019	Beds Ranking 2018	Name	Age	Decathlon Points 2019 (No. of races)	Decathlon Points (2018) (No. of races)	GB Ranking 2019	GB Ranking 2018
4	3	Karen MacKenzie	46	3,881 (10)	3,567 (9)	108	132
7	-	Laura Smith	25	2,785 (7)	-	276	-
14	-	Alice Pinney	20	2,290 (7)	-	431	-
17	-	Kelly Cooke	43	2,024 (5)	-	546=	-
18	22	Sharon Thompson	52	1,835 (10)	1,149 (6)	636	1,055
20	23	Michelle Neal	39	1,813 (5)	1,074 (3)	646	1,111
21	-	Jodie Armstrong	37	1,621 (4)	-	751	-
24	12	Sonia Bentley	51	1,047 (4)	2,002 (8)	1,171	548
25	25	Lorraine Sadler	48	935 (4)	909 (4)	1,250	1,242
28	30	Gwen Skingley	37	814 (4)	662 (4)	1,338	1,434
33	-	Clare "Chippy" Murphy-Snape	40	635 (3)	-	1,471	-

Whilst not necessarily reaching the potential maximum ten qualifying individual races, it was great to see our Masters & Seniors of all ages and various lengths of club membership testing themselves over new distances and disciplines – the very essence of the Decathlon Competition. With points being awarded for swimmers’ times in relation to their individual ages, it is theoretically possible to gain higher points even if one actually swims slower from one year to the next.

Click here for link to the full 2019 GB Decathlon Results