Athletics: Dutch visitor sets shot put record

Isle Rietberg (Logan Park) won the senior girls shot put that was the glamour event of the Otago secondary schools athletics championships on Saturday.

It is the only athletics event in which New Zealand has a world and Olympic champion.

The girls in the throwing events were attempting to walk in the footsteps of Valerie Vili.

Vili was the inspiration for Rietberg (18) and runner-up Nicole Bradley (Queens) as they strove to break the record.

Bradley equalled her own record with a put of 10.45m but Rietberg went one better and broke the record with her three throws 11.50m, 11.63m and 11.15m.

She beat the record by a massive 1.18m in her first season using the 4kg implement.

It placed Rietberg third on the New Zealand junior women's ranking list for the shot put this season.

The two girls ahead of her are on scholarships at United States universities and the distances were achieved overseas.

Rietberg is an exchange student from the Netherlands who is spending a year studying at Logan Park High School.

In Holland, she is coached by Joop Tervoort, who has coached a silver medallist at senior world championships.

She has joined Raylene Bates' throwing squad while she is in Dunedin.

When she returns to the Netherlands, Rietberg will study medicine at Groningen University in her home town.

Her immediate task is to improve her distance by a metre at the Otago and Southland championships at Invercargill next Saturday to beat the record of 12.56m that Judith Knapp (Menzies College) set in 1984.

Rietberg and Bradley dominated the senior girls throwing events on Saturday, with the Dutch visitor also winning the javelin (30.53m) and Bradley winning the discus (34.65m) and hammer throw (34.61m).

Rebekah Greene (St Hildas) ran from the front and won the senior girls 1500m in a record time of 4min 38.23sec.

It reduced the record that school mate Louise Harvey set last year by a massive 16 seconds.

Greene (16), who had spent last week on a school tramp on the Abel Tasman track, led the field through the first lap in 69 seconds and two laps in 2min 25sec and kept moving away from the field.

In the end, she won by 21 seconds from Shauna Pali (Kavanagh) with Bella Bloomfield (Otago Girls) third in 5min 00.85sec.

William Scorgie (Otago Boys) used different tactics to win the senior boys 800m-1500m double.

In the 1500m, he trailed Alex Gorrie (Kavanagh) by 15m down the back straight, but sprinted strongly round the final bend and caught him down the straight to win narrowly.

Scorgie was timed at 4min 07.30sec and Gorrie at 4min 07.91sec.

The time by both runners was just short of the record of 4min 07.20sec set by junior international Max Smith (Kings) in 2001.