Pubz Comm Reporter: Jason Lun Leung 

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Last Friday, the track and field events were held at the SRC, followed by the IHG closing ceremony. KE supporters went down to the field to cheer up our athletics team and for the ensuing ceremony.

At around 5pm, the first people started arriving. The athletes began preparing and the first supporters arrived. Very soon, the place was bustling with activity. Our athletics team had been training for this event under Ying Rui, but during the last weeks, many runners had to pull out because of injuries. Thus, with the team of runners stretched for numbers, our prospects looked quite grim. This was very sad, especially considering that some had been training months before in the hope of mounting a serious challenge for this event, in which, it has to be said, our hall generally performed poorly in the previous years.

Nevertheless, those who were still fit were there on the track, preparing themselves for their race, while those who had trained but would not be able to run simply joined the groups of supporters.

The 4×100m (Men), one of the most anticipated races for KE, was the second event of the day. Initially, there had been 6 guys contending for the starting places, but because of injuries, two of them pulled out. Nevertheless, we knew of their training, and were quite expectant on this one. But our injured runners were no match for those from the traditional athletics power houses, and Yong Shen, Pak Kin, Han Sheng and Joe could not bring us the medal we had hoped for despite their best efforts.

The following events were also quite dispiriting. KE never managed to really put up any challenge for any of the races. The final event of the day, the medley, ended with KE last.

It would not be fair to indiscriminately criticize the athletics team. Those who ran trained diligently for several months. Some of them ran through pain and injuries to complete the day’s events. Bad luck made it so that they were not able to compete with the other halls even after they have dedicated so much of their time to preparing for this day.

However, some things can definitely be improved.  I thought that there was no ‘squad depth:’ we had too few runners. Some of them had to pull out, leaving the remaining few to run 2, sometimes even 3 races on the same day. KE residents are not usually super- athletes. The fact that the few who do go to trainings end up running all the races by themselves will not help. Maybe if we could get more people to train, they could specialize in an event, and, hopefully, this would give us a better chance of competing.

Also, the supporters can do better. Here again, those who did come down cannot be criticized. Over the whole of IHG, KE supporters have been quite few, especially when compared to those of other halls. One good thing is that those who came down were never afraid to shout and cheer as loudly as they could. Here, the message would be to come down in large numbers, and then, just shout and cheer with everybody. Cheering is a simple thing: there will always be somebody to try something funny or start a new cheer. The hard part is getting enough people to follow. So, yeah, do come down to support next year.

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