---

Symonds and Lennox Take the Elite Title

Jon Brooke / 08.06.2009

As expected, with an hour's advantage from the first day, the winners of the elite were Andy Symonds and Jethro Lennox, athough Jethro had been sick on the course and they said they had had to slow down. The other two elite pairs in the chasing start managed to take back 20 minutes from them and also exchanged places. The prize for the winners was the entry to the BAMM in Sweden on 14th/15th August, including air fares and accomodation.

On the A course, Munro bagger extraordinaire, Steven Fallon and partner Jon Ascroft held onto their lead although they were second on the day by just over a minute to Stewart Bellamy and Matt Scriven who moved up into second place. The A course also took in the summit of Beinn Fhada, a Munro, so Steven (and any other A course competitors) can count that towards the start of another round - only 283 to go!

Oleg Chepelin and Robbie Simpson extended their lead in the B course, although their advantage wasn’t so big as on Saturday. Things were different on the C and D courses though, which both had a change of leaders.

On the C course James Humble and Jonathan Mor came from 4th place to win. We’re not sure quite how things worked out on the course to put them in the lead, but we do know they were lucky to keep the lead when they made a significant navigation error in the last kilometre of the course. Descending the final hill they were expecting to hit a road and turn left to the event centre. But they actually came down to the left of the event centre and turned left, to end up running away from it. Luckily they realised their mistake before they blew the lead, but it was close.

In the D classs it sounds as though there was some good racing at the front of the field all day. The first 5 teams were only spread by 16 minutes in the chasing start and by half way round they were all close together and probably exchanging the lead for the day several times, before overnight leaders Sandy Trust and Collin Crabbie had a bit of a catastrophy and lost 35 minutes between checkpoints 2 and 3.

The leaders at that point were then Tom Rowley and Richard Hughes who had been 5th on Saturday, but they too made a mistake and overshot the penultimate checkpoint to let the three chasing teams through – bad luck chaps.

Last, but not least, the winners of the score event were Kenny Leitch and Keith Masson though Russ Ladkin and Paul Dickens jumped up from fourth to second with the best score of the day.

See All Stories On This Race