Great Britain international George Evans has recovered from injuries sustained earlier this month in a road accident and is now back in full training.
The Inverness Harriers club member, who is one of Scotland’s top young shot and discus specialists, is currently based at Kansas University, where he is on a sports scholarship while studying for an economics degree.
Evans has an eye on representing Great Britain in this summer’s European championships and has not ruled out bidding for Olympic selection. So he was relieved to have escaped relatively unscathed from the collision.
He said: “I was unfortunately involved in a car accident which ended up with both cars involved being written off. However, I am alright. I had some bruising down my entire right side, but other than that I was completely OK and I’m training again.”
Evans, who celebrated his 23rd birthday earlier in the week, is now planning for the summer season, assuming lockdown restrictions are relaxed and major competitions return.
His preparations have not been hampered too much by the pandemic and he is relatively happy with the progress being made.
He said: “There have been a lot of changes to the way things are done here in Kansas. There is, of course, the mandatory mask-wearing, but it hasn’t really had a huge effect on the way we train. I am still training twice a day and have been since I got back from the UK in the summer.
“However, so far as competitions are concerned, there seems to be a bigger change. It looks like we are having roughly the same number of competitions this winter, but there will be fewer universities taking part.
“As far as I know, we still have the conference championships in February, which is the main competition for me during the indoors season.”
Looking towards the summer, Evans admits Olympic selection in the discus might be a step too far at this stage in his career, but he is determined to give it a good go.
He was unable to compete outdoors in 2020 because of the widespread cancellation of track and field meetings, so his best discus throw of 59.84m dates back to 2019.
He said: “Olympic selection is going to be hard to achieve as the qualifying distance has been increased from previous years and is now 66m.
“I have it at the back of my head as a goal, but I am not making it one of my main goals as I feel like it might just be out of reach this season, but you never know.
“I am just going to keep training as hard as I can and keep focussed on improving my technique throughout the rest of the winter season and come out ready for outdoors and see what I can do in the run-up to the British Championships.”
