It was a doubly historic day for the club today at the Connacht Novice Cross-Country Championships in Roscommon, where Craughwell AC not only fielded a women’s cross country team for the first time ever but went on to win the Connacht Novice Cross Country title led home by Maeve Curley. 

With Galway washed out for the day, luckily our neighbours in Roscommon organised a slightly better day on this course dubbed as “paradise” by St. Ronan’s stalwart Pat Fitzgibbon.

Maeve Curley put in a truly awesome performance to take the individual gold medal in a tough battle with a Sligo athlete. Maeve had raced into a good lead but as the race entered its final stages the Sligo athlete was closing all the time and had the gap down to 5m with 150m to go. Maeve responded like a true champion to put in a lung-bursting finish to claim the Connacht Novice title. A little further down the field, the rest of the Craughwell AC team battled exceptionally hard and pulled off a super performance when capturing the Connacht title with a low-score of 20 points, just 2 ahead of Sligo. 

Our novice men’s team put in a stellar performance also and while rumour is that the team placed 3rd overall, the results were not announced today due to an objection – so we will have to wait a few days before this is confirmed. I will update this article when full results are available.

One other notable aspect of the races today was that for the Moran household it was triple Connacht gold with Ann medalling on the novice women's team, Matthew medalling on the U15 boys team and Liam medalling on the U13 boys team …  you could say success runs in the family!