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Morton siblings produce best ever season results

 

Morton siblings produce best ever season results

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AOC
Morton siblings produce best ever season results
In his quest to race himself into form for the 2017 World Championships in Hochfilzen, Australia’s emerging biathlon star Damon Morton performed the nation’s best result of the season and his best sprint result in Junior IBU Cup so far.

BIATHLON: In his quest to race himself into form for the 2017 World Championships in Hochfilzen, Australia’s emerging biathlon star Damon Morton performed the nation’s best result of the season and his best sprint result in Junior IBU Cup so far.

Morton finished an extremely respectable 22nd out of 83 in the IBU Junior Cup 3 in Pokljuka, Slovenia.

The 20-year-old was very fast in his first lap showing that he has improved his outright speed since the first trimester in December 2016.

In the prone shooting he again shot clean taking his run of perfect clean prone shooting to 6 races in succession, and in bib 32 emerged from the range in third position.

He followed up in standing with a second bout of perfect shooting to maintain his early high position on the leader board and went on to finish a commendable 1 min and 28 seconds behind the winner K Strelskov from Russia, who was first in a time of 26.27.

The race was his first individual performance since developing bronchitis over Christmas and missing out on National Team duties at IBU Cup 4 and 5 to recover.

A now fit and healthy Damon then joined forced with his sister Darcie Morton to compete in the IBU Junior Cup 3 single mixed relay.

In a really high class field, the pair were very solid on the shooting range to finish in 8th position, using just 6 spare rounds to hit all 20 targets.

It was Australian Biathlon’s best ever relay result on the world stage and showed how well we are progressing against powerful Nordic nations including Russia and France

The mixed relay is a fixture for Australia to target in the future for potential top 10 results at major international competitions.

Darcie began the race well shooting clean in her first prone, but had some problems in the next standing and needed to use all 3 spares to hit down all five targets. She tagged off to Damon in 12th position out of 18 countries.

Damon had a very strong first leg in both skiing and shooting to lead the team into 9th position. Shooting clean in both the standing and prone positions without the need for any spares and in the same time as the leading Russian athlete, Damon was able to overtake a number of quality teams including Estonia and Romania and pull away from Canada.

Damon lost only 25 seconds to the fastest male before handing off to Darcie for leg 3.

Darcie was consistent in her final 3km leg again shooting clean in prone and just needing one spare for standing and was able to put Damon in a good position to ski Australia into 8th.

It was a fantastic result for the duo ahead of the big races in February which includes for Damon the World Championships (pending qualifying wildcard to be announced overnight) and for both of them wearing the green and gold at the Asian Winter Games in Sapporo, Japan early next month.

 

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