Athletics: Carson gets confidence-boosting win

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Hamish Carson got a confidence boosting win over 1500m at the Windsor Open meeting in Canada on Sunday (NZ time), but came up just short of the time he was after.

Running in the Canadian city of Windsor, near Detroit, the five-times NZ 1500m champion was attempting to become the third New Zealand athlete to get the IAAF standard and the New Zealand A standard for the 1500m at the Rio Olympic Games.

Racing in a top field including fellow Kiwis Julian Matthews, Eric Speakman with Olympic medallist Nick Willis providing the pace, Carson won in 3:36.65 just outside the target of 3:36.20.

Matthews finished third in the race, clocking 3:36.94 while Speakman ran a personal best 3:37.44 in fifth. Speakman's performance moved him up two places to thirteenth on the New Zealand all-time list for 1500, ahead of the great Sir Peter Snell.

With Willis having already been selected for Rio, two spots remain in the blue-ribbon event in which New Zealand has won three Olympic golds, a silver and two bronze medals.

Matthews ran 3:36.14 to dip under the standard on Tuesday in Swarthmore, while Carson was just 0.11 seconds further back in 3:36.25, but painfully outside the time he wanted. Speakman was timed at 3:37.85 at the same meeting.

In other results Lucy Oliver placed 12th in the 5000m race in Eagle Rock, California, running 15:39.30, while Malcolm Hicks was also 12th in his 5000m, timed at 13:54.80.

Nick Southgate, competing in the pole vault at a competition in Portugal cleared 5.40, just shy of his personal best of 5.47, but may have the satisfaction of setting a national indoor record as the competition was moved indoors due to bad weather.