2024 St Albans 120m Womens Gift

Grace O'Dwyer takes Back Markers honours at St Albans for 2024. We would expect Wang Lecouter to not run after her efforts at Maryborough on New Years but we do see Nicole Berridge line up off 4.25m along with Zoe Neale (4.75m) and Ellie Keratianos (5.25m) from the back.

Great to see Olympian Ellie Beer expected to run off 5.5m, clearly in some good form over 400m what can see do over the gift distance? Claire De Salis runs from 6.75m and Layla Watson goes from 7m. Stephanie Rutherford will be one to watch running off 8.5m after placing 4th at Terang off the same mark. Grace Carter (10.75m) and Amelia Spenceley (11m) have both been in tremendous form lately and will both be threats to the rest of the field.

Spenceley is the pick here for mine after the performances at Maryborough if she can back up from those 6 runs!

Zoe Neale 2nd
Ellie Beer 1st
Clare De Salis
Ebony Newton 3rd
Amelia Spenceley
Georgia Mills

Neale and Beer to fight this one out. Doesn’t make to much sense to me for Spenceley to get out to 11m to snare St Albans. Ballarat or Rye would be better targets for her even though I still have her a little bit off winning one just yet. Not running up the hill at the start certainly does help the outmarkers however.

Good field here for St Albans, also good to see some interstaters fly in and add to the quality.

Newton has always been in my blackbook, and I’ve always been a fan of De Salis. I think they may just fall short here.
If we see Robbo himself at this meeting… expect Lythgo and Rutherford will go really close, perhaps even the 1&2. Neale raced well the other day and Beer has a mark that always puts her in contention.

Neale
Beer 2nd
De Salis
Lythgo 1st
Newton 3rd
Rutherford

Tipping another win for the Vikings.