A double event in Marsascala, held recently, brought the MAAA non-stadia competitions to a close for this season.

Two consecutive 10km races, the second reserved solely for the Masters’ category, open for athletes aged 35 years and over, sealed the individual competitions as well as that for the team event in the leagues.

Starting with the latter, the St Patrick’s AC clan emulated the northern challengers from Mellieħa AC who last year were the winners in both men’s and women’s championship.

This year it was the Saints who won both, nearly making it a clean sweep by having five of the first six places in the individual leagues.

Amassing a total of 126 penalty points to Mellieħa’s 185, and just 43 to the northerners’ 131 in the women’s section, St Patrick’s fully merit the titles of champions, as do their first trio among the women, Carmen Hili, Joelle Cortis and Angela Sammut.

In the men’s individual classification, Andrew Grech, of Mellieħa AC, finished behind runner-up Mario Grech and Ibrahim Hussein, the overall winner.

In the second race for Masters an hour later, in which each individual time is re-calculated according to the athlete’s age by specially-designed software in use worldwide, the relatively young Gerald Grech finished first.

However, it was the effort of 49-year-old Brian Magri which won the day, when his corrected time crowned him a winner by nearly half a minute over Charles Cilia, with Stephen Borg in third place.

In the race for women, Hili did the double despite the contest here being tighter than ever.

Hili won by 16 seconds from Cecilia Fenech with Sammut a mere three seconds further back.