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2003 Race 4: British Sprint Championships 5/4/03
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 Closest Women's Race in UK Cup History!
The fourth UK Cup race of the year was also the first ‘official’ British Sprint Championships, and it provided all the ingredients of a great event – technical terrain, good courses, plenty of spectator excitement, and even uninterrupted sunshine. Ham hill was an unusual venue, with a mixture of sand dune-style quarry detail and rocky outcrops.
Unusually, it was the women’s race that provided the most intense competition as the top 6 places were separated by less than 30 seconds. Heather Monro was back from Norway for the weekend, and went into the race as clear favourite, but it was not her day. A big mistake by Monro early in the course allowed Sarah Rollins to steal the top spot by just 2 seconds over Jenny Whitehead with Monro in third. Whitehead said after the race “I’m sure I could have done that run-in 2 seconds faster…”.
The men’s results contained less surprises as Jamie Stevenson took a relatively comfortable victory over Jon Duncan. Third spot was taken by Dickie Wren. All three were satisfied with their races, although Jamie had a moment of concern after the road crossing, where he lost map contact on a route through a dense gorse area. After some recent problems Jamie was heard to say at the finish, "I don't want to go to download because that's where I find out I'm disqualified!" One of the best results of the day was Graham Gristwood’s 6th place who proved that juniors really can hold their own against an elite field. This followed his 2nd place in 2002’s unofficial sprint champs. He took several major scalps and even led the race for the first 3 controls until Stevenson took over.
The only shame of the day was that so few ‘non-elites’ took part in the open races. Perhaps they are put off by the term ‘Sprint’, or perhaps the discipline is just not well enough known yet, but hopefully in future years it will be much better attended.
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