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Super-duper Sunday

March 19th, 2006 - 9:06pm

The last of the three things we saw at the Commonwealth Games this year was at the “Super Sunday” event at the MCG.

If you followed the link, you’ll note that we saw twenty-seven heats in the 100m, EAD T-12 (vision impared) 100m and 400m as well as the shot put qualifying, the women’s javelin final (the best Australian placed fourth), and the women’s and men’s marathons.

The marathons were quite interesting in that we saw the runners from both events do a couple of laps around the track, disappear, and then come back a number of hours later — almost forgotten — to run another single lap to finish their race.

Seventy-five thousand people were in attendance when Kerryn McCann ran into the MCG after running for almost two and a half hours, and (barely) in the lead. I think every single one of those people were cheering; the sound was deafening and even though she was overtaken with 400m to go, I’d say the crowd definitely inspired McCann to come back and take the lead with less than 200m to finish. A fantastic end to the race and really exciting to see — a great atmosphere.

Later, a female Australian marathon competitor entered the MCG to great cheers, but she seemed completely delirious. She was running extremely strangely (leaning back an awful lot) and very slowly. As she hit the finish line she collapsed and had to be carried from the track. I’d say the crowd urged her to finish and if it wasn’t a “home town” event she probably would have given up.

Unfortunately, this was the last event for us at the 2006 Commonwealth Games. Normally we’re not big sports fans, but both Justine and I have really enjoyed going to the games this weekend. It wasn’t cheap (and definitely as expensive as it could have been, since we got cheap seats), but it was totally worth it.

Tags: athletics, commonwealth games, outing, photoblog, photography