What Happened to Spring?
WORD S & P HOTO S MA R G I F RE E M AN TLE
Victorian Sprint Champs, was only available on Sunday 17 November, a week before the series was due to finish. Race 1 - Edgewater
The Friday evening race was a first for Sprint into Spring, and, being part of the Melbourne City Race Weekend, it attracted a mix of locals, interstaters and internationals. The City Race organisers requested longer than usual courses for this event in order to follow the London City Race model. This posed a challenge for planner Judi Herkes to meet this criterion, while not compromising the sprint and hill climb legs that are a feature of SIS. Edgewater is a mix of campus, parkland and streets and Judi used these to good advantage. All courses started with a novel “tunnel crawl” before being taken straight into the complexity of Victoria University campus and then into the park gardens for the hill climb, followed quickly by a long sprint leg. While the Usain course only required competitors to navigate back to the arena, the Mo and Sally courses continued north with some long legs through the Edgewater estate, of the type that were expected in the Sunday City Race.
Some years Sprint into Spring gets perhaps one wet day. Not so for the 2019 series where the weather cycle seemed to bring cold wet weather nearly every Saturday.
Race 2 – Kensington
The series had a slightly different composition this year, starting with a double header on the Friday evening and Saturday as a lead-in to the Melbourne City Race on the Sunday. Also, the series presentations were held at a separate pop-up sprint the weekend after the last race. This was because access to Kardinia International College, the venue for the
There had been much discussion over the years that the Kensington Banks area might make a good sprint map with its complex maze of laneways, parks, and old stock fences. So it was decided to make the move and include it in this year’s program, with Fredrik Johansson and Ted van Geldermalsen both mapping and planning the courses. Setting up for this page 35
