Sam Ruthe became the youngest senior athletics title-holder in winning the New Zealand 3000 metres championship at the Potts Classic in Hastings last year. He'll be back on the track next Saturday, running the 800m. Photo / Kerry Marshall / Photosport.
Sam Ruthe became the youngest senior athletics title-holder in winning the New Zealand 3000 metres championship at the Potts Classic in Hastings last year. He'll be back on the track next Saturday, running the 800m. Photo / Kerry Marshall / Photosport.
A switch of event times is being contemplated to offer the best possible conditions for a possible attack on the men’s 800 metres national record at the Allan and Sylvia Potts Classic athletics meet.
Meeting director Richard Potts confirmed multiple-record breaking teenager Sam Ruthe and Olympic Games 1500m representative SamTanner, both from Tauranga, have entered the race.
But also a possible starter for the Hastings competition on January 17 is Wellington athlete James Preston, who in Germany in May 2024 set the record of 1m 44.04s, beating the 1:44.3 run by Sir Peter Snell in setting a world record in 1962 on grass in Christchurch.
At the New Zealand Secondary Schools athletics championships on Hastings’ Mitre 10 Sports Park track last month, Ruthe set an Australasian Under 18 800m record of 1m 46.81s, while Tanner has a best for the distance of 1m 46.14s, run in Christchurch in February 2024.
Both Ruthe and Tanner would have to run at least two seconds better than their previous bests and Potts said the prospect of a new record is not being “talked-up”.
But it is “definitely” an event in which the athletes are after personal bests and they are capable of breaking the record on the “perfect” night, he said.
A long-range forecast is for some rain on Saturday and daytime temperatures still up to about 27C.
The Sam Ruthe and Sam Tanner New Zealand 1500m championship dead heat in Dunedin last March. Photo / Athletics NZ
The prospects were spurred by Ruthe’s world 1000m age-group best of 2m 7.82s in Tauranga on Saturday, just 1.25 seconds shy of a national senior record set by John Walker in Norway in 1980, and just shy of the one-time world record of 2m 16.6s run by Snell in 1964.
Ruthe last year, at the age of 15, became the youngest runner to claim a New Zealand senior title, in the 3000m in Hastings, and soon afterwards became the youngest runner to break four minutes for the mile.
The Potts Classic incorporates the first New Zealand short-course championships, in which star sprinter Zoe Hobbs has entered the 60m dash, and is also the first night of Athletics New Zealand’s Summer Circuit.
Doug Laing is a Hawke’s Bay Today reporter based in Napier, and has covered most New Zealand sports at some stage in more than 50 years in the news industry.
