16th African Senior Athletics Championships-Seychelles finishes 18th thanks to Leveau-Agricole |06 May 2008

South Africa came top at the five-day championships held in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, with 22 medals – 12 gold, two silver and eight bronze.

Nigeria was next with 19 medals, including seven gold, seven silver and five bronze.
Ethiopia finished third with 15 – six gold, six silver and three bronze – while Kenya settled for fourth place with 16 medals – five gold, five silver and six bronze.

The other countries to win gold medals were Algeria, Egypt, Morocco, Botswana, Tunisia (two each), Sudan, Cameroon, Senegal and Guinea (one each).

Leveau-Agricole finished the javelin competition with a best throw of 52.92 metres to win silver behind South African gold medallist Sunette Viljoen, who had a winning effort measuring 55.17m.

Seychelles was represented by two other athletes – Céline Laporte and William Woodcock – in Addis Ababa.

While Laporte did not compete in the women’s long jump event, won by South African Janice Josephs with a fine jump of 6.64m, Woodcock could only clear the bar at 2.10m in the men’s high jump. The height was 7 centimetres below his outdoor best of 2.17m set at the Seventh Indian Ocean Islands Games in Madagascar last year. He won the gold medal with that effort.

Woodcock’s training partner, Kabelo Kgosiemang, won the gold medal with a Botswana national record of 2.34m to retain his title.

Algerian Mohamed Benhedia won the silver medal on a countback after he cleared 2.18m, as did bronze medallist Boubacar Sere of Burundi.

Mauritius won two silver medals, through Jonathan Chimier (men’s long jump with 7.99m) and Stephan Buckland (men’s 200m in 20.62 seconds) to finish 15th out of the 24 medal-winning countries.

G. G.