Magic Moment: Remembering Greer Alsop's silver
We turn the clock back to September 2011 when Southland triple jumper Greer Alsop impressed on the international stage.
Southland athletics has produced many magical moments so as part of a new series we are going to go about remembering some of them. We start today by turning the clock back to September 2011 when triple jumper Greer Alsop impressed on the international stage.
Back in 2011 at the Isle of Man Commonwealth Youth Games, Isle of Man, the New Zealand team included Southland’s Greer Alsop.
While swimming collected the bulk of the New Zealand medals, athletics can be well satisfied with the team performance considering the number making finals (all the more noteworthy as there were only six lanes and six finalists) with Kiwis in the 200, 400 and 800 finals and Dalton Coppins winning bronze in the 200m.
However, Greer was the best-performing New Zealander, winning silver in the triple jump. The then SGHS student was always in second, recording her best jump of 12.39 in the first round as did the winner, Australian Nat Apikotoa with 12.55.
However Greer was the more consistent jumper - Nat’s second best attempt was 12.17 while Greer had a 12.27 and 12.20. Her 12.39 had a 2.3 tail wind, slightly over the limit for record purposes but the 12.27 had a legal 1.1 wind and established a new Southland W19 and SW record.
A day earlier Greer competed in the long jump, reaching 5.83m, just 4 cm shy of the bronze medal. This was a huge improvement on her previous best but as the wind was a stiff 5.5 m/s it did not count for record purposes.
Since then she has collected a long string of national and Oceania triple and long jump championship medals (10 of them gold), won an unprecedented three successive NZSS TJ titles earned an athletic scholarship to Washington State University where she graduated in psychology then gained a masters at Canterbury University.
Persistent injury problems forced her retirement 3 years ago.