17 Oct 2022
Aspire Academy current student-athlete Seifeldin Abdelsalam won Qatar’s only gold medal at the 4th Asian Under-18 Athletics Championships in Kuwait.
Abdelsalam won the pole vault, at the event which ended on Sunday, with a leap of 5.10 metres.
“What made Seifeldin’s performance especially impressive was that he was one failure away from being eliminated but came back to win gold,” Aspire Academy’s Athletics Head Coach Tom Crick pointed out.”
“If he had failed at 5.05m he would have won silver but he cleared it and then 5.10m first time to win gold.”
There was a silver medal for Mahamat Abdrahman in the 400m hurdles.
“He hit hurdle 4 badly but fought back and was closing on 1st place in last 5 metres but couldn’t quite overhaul Taiwan’s Yan-kai Lin for the gold,” Crick explained.
“Overall there were good performances from our student-athletes.”
There was a narrow miss for Jaber Al -Jalahama in the long jump as he set new personal best to finish fourth just eight centimetres short of a place on the podium.
In the sprints Tameem Al -Temimi reached the finals of both the 100m and 200m but finished eighth and seventh respectively. He set a new personal best for the 200 in his heats as he clocked 22.14 seconds.
Aspire Academy’s other representative on the Qatar team in Kuwait was Khalid Al Haj, who was seventh in the discus.
Qatar claimed two more medals at the event with Djibrine Ahmat, under the coaching of the national athletics federation, taking silver in the shot put and bronze in the discus.