Kilian continues his march at the TNF100
After a race-long battle with Salomon team-mates Ryan Sandes and then new-kid-on-the-block Francios D’Haene, Catalan Kilian Jornet has added the TNF 100 to his list of amazing trail achievements…
Biding his time for the first half of the race, D’Haene watched the master Kilian Jornet and SA’s 4 Deserts specialist Ryan Sandes run together for around 40km, at which point Sandes began to cramp. D’Haene then joined Kilian and they ran together until 87km.
D'Haene leads Jornet into CP4
Salomon’s 2011 recruit Francios D’Haene then showed why his he is being touted as the ‘French guy with the most trail running potential’ as he took the race on out of checkpoint 5 and exited with a 20 second lead.
However, Kilian showed his class as they ran into the last 10km and overhauled D’Haene to win by around 5 mins in a new course record 9hr 19mins. Ryan Sandes held on gallantly for third in 9:55, around 35 minutes down on Jornet.
Kilian refuels
In the women’s race Devon Crosby-Helms had led early on, but was to suffer from sciatic pain as the race entered check point 2. She was running with Canada’s ultra specialist Jen Segger at that point and somewhere soon after Devon decided that the pain was not getting better and decided to withdraw.
This left Segger out front, with over 2/3rds of the 100km still to run! Shortly after Spain’s Nerea Martinez then joined Segger and these two ran together for a good distance. Info was a little sketchy through the next two checkpoints to 5 (87km), but it appeared that Martinez opened up a lead in this section.
The Spaniard exited the final check point around seven minutes up on Australia’s Julie Quinn, who had steamed through the section CP4 to 5. Segger was suffering a little at this point as she entered CP5 in third, around 12 mins down on Martinez.
Nerea Martinez
Over the closing kilometres Nerea pushed on and with Quinn and Segger maintaining a strong pace. But a sorry twist of fate was to beset Martinez as she missed a turn in the last kilometres to be caught by a fresh-looking Quinn. The Australian took advantage and stormed to a fantastic win by 2 mins from Martinez. Segger held on for third.
Some finish images starting to appear here, with live results here.
Full reports, images and reactions to follow on the TNF site, the Salomon Running Facebook page and the AROC Twitter page
