Hawick runner Thomas MacAskill now British half-mile grass-track champion after win in Highlands

The 19-year-old claimed that title at Lochcarron Highland Games in Wester Ross on Saturday after crossing the line ahead of Inverness runner Scott Fraser.

That was one of two wins there for MacAskill, his other being over 1,600m, and he followed up those first-place finishes with two more the day after over the same distances at Stonehaven Highland Games in Aberdeenshire, taking his tally for this summer season to nine and for the year to date to ten.

“That was four races and four wins at the weekend, so that’s not too bad, and I was delighted to win the championship,” he said.

“This time last year I was on eight wins and now I’m on ten wins for this year. It’s going pretty well.”

Reviewing his championship success, complete with £120 prize money, the Teviotdale Harriers member added: “I’ve no idea what my time was as I wasn’t wearing a watch.

“Times don’t really matter in championship races anyway – it’s just about getting the win.

“I just got in front on the last lap. It was kind of a typical championship race – everybody just started off jogging, waiting for somebody else to make a move, and then on the last lap it was just a burn-up, with the fastest man winning, and that was me.

“I took the lead with about 75m to go and got a gap of about 2m or 3m and looked around, then just ran for the line as hard as I could and I was about seven or eight yards ahead at the finish.”

The former Hawick High School pupil is going the distance off the track as well as on it as Saturday’s games venue, the Attadale Estate, near Strathcarron, is a 270-plus-mile trip from Hawick, followed by a 170-odd-mile coast-to-coast journey, and he’s heading on to Inveraray Highland Games in Argyll and Bute today, July 18, then Mull’s on Thursday and Lochearnhead’s, near Stirling, on Saturday.

MacAskill only has a month left of competition in his homeland left before heading over the Atlantic to the USA in mid-August to take up a track and field scholarship studying sports psychology at Central Arizona College, near Coolidge, after completing a higher national diploma in sports coaching and development at Borders College in Galashiels this year, so he’s determined to give as good an account of himself as he can in the meanwhile, he says, and is targeting topping his tally of 15 wins last summer in a tighter timescale.