WORLD SILVER FOR JAMIE!

There was another huge breakthrough for Inverness Harriers life member Jamie Bowie and for the club at the World Indoor Championships in Sopot, Poland on Sunday March 9th in the form of a silver medal for Team GB in the men’s 4 x 400m relay. Jamie already has a relay gold from the 2011 European under 23 championships but this latest honour marks another huge step forward. And the British team were only denied gold by an American squad which was forced to break the world record to take the title.

This time the disappointment he experienced at the World Outdoors in Moscow was not repeated and a superb run in the the Saturday heats was on this occasion rewarded by a run in the Sunday final. Jamie ran the second leg both times and made a big contribution to winning the heat in 3:06.06. The one change between heat and final was that Michael Bingham stepped aside for individual runner Nigel Levine. Jamie received the baton from Williams in that final in second place and ran another techincally impressive race to maintain the runner up spot for Luke Lennon-Ford and Levine to bring Team GB home in for silver, with the bronze going to Jamiaica. The USA set a world record of 3:02.13 while Britain’s 3:03.49 was close to both the British and European records.

“It’s only my second major championship as a senior,” Jamie said. “To land with a slver medal and to be able to prove myself on the global stage is pretty fantastic and we’ve got a lot of potential there and I think we showed we have a good team, a strong team. We pulled it together and it took a world record to beat us.”

Jamie’s silver medal has been warmlywelcomed by Keith Geddes, President of Inverness Harriers who said: “The whole club is just bouncing about this latest success from Jamie. Inverness Harriers has a long record over a period of nearly 30 years of getting athletes into British teams and selected for major championships, but to get a world silver medal is amazing. We also very much appreciate that Jamie has been a member of this club since he was just 12 and has stuck loyally with us despite the level of performance that he has now reached.”

Just seven hours after returning from Poland, Jamie was back at the airport to fly out to Florida for warm weather training which lasts until early in April.