‘Fantastic team spirit’ for Gib team in Gold Coast Commonwealth Games

The Gibraltar team at the Commonwealth Games in the Gold Coast in Australia is in “fantastic team spirit” president of the Gibraltar Commonwealth Association, Harry Murphy, said yesterday.

Speaking from Australia, sounding both cheerful and confident of the teams overall achievements so far and looking ahead to the rest of the competition, Mr Murphy described the highly competitive games as “fantastic”.

Extremely pleased at the way in which the team was performing, and taking into account the very high standards at the games, he gave mention to all the athletes and sports involved – “the achievements of all the local athletes” from the excellent results of Gibraltar’s triathlon team at the start of the games to the national records and personal best broken so far in swimming.

Mr Murphy emphasised several times how the team as a whole was performing to “their very best and striving to perform above all maximum possibility”.

He added: “We have a great unified team with all the players being totally focused wanting to do their very best and perform to the top of their abilities.”

All sports, he said, were supporting each other at their events and this was always great to see.

With competition still to get underway in some of the sports Gibraltar (at the time of going to press) had seen two national records being broken in the swimming and one personal best during the heats and some very positive results in the Triathlon at the start of the games.

In swimming Christina Linares achieved a new national record in the Women's 50m Freestyle Heats of 28.68. The day before Jordan Gonzalez had struck lucky too in the Heats in the 100m Back Stroke where he also broke the national record. Aidan Carroll made it a PB in the 200m Freestyle.

Christina Linares said she was delighted to have broken the record “on such a big occasion” but was now focusing on her next race.

Jordan Gonzalez said his race felt extremely controlled for him.

“So I'm happy with the time, now I'm focused on smashing the 50 (back),” he added.

Coach Joe Santos was well pleased that his young squad was doing so well in such a competitive sport at such a high level.

“This is what we have come for. It is proof that our hard work in the training pool pays off,” he said from Australia.

In the early hours of this morning Gibraltar was expecting to see further action in the pool (on day three) with swimmers Matt Savitz, Jordan Gonzalez, Jim Sanderson and Christina Linares all taking to their blocks – including the 200m Butterfly, 50m Backstroke and 50m Fly.

On day two meanwhile at The Oxenford Studios Christian Navas lost in straight sets (3-0) to Cameron Stafford (Cayman Islands) in the last 16 of the men’s plate.?

The next few days will also see our athletes on the track at the Carrara Stadium and our shooters in in air pistol and air rifle at the Belmont Shooting Centre.

MAIN PHOTO: Christina Linares (far left) in the Women's 50m Freestyle Heats where she set a new national record of 28.68 this week at the Gold Coast 2018 Commonwealth Games at the Optus Aquatic Centre. Diving into the pool next to Christina left to right are: Miss Khatun of Bangladesh, Vinoli Kaluarachchi of Sri Lanka and Therese Soukup of Seychelles. Pic: REUTERS/David Gray