Beere off to a flier as Lewis tries his utmost

Guernsey’s lawn bowls star never trailed on day one as she won both her opening women’s singles matches convincingly at Victoria Park in Royal Leamington Spa to put herself top of the Section D group on six points and in pole position to reach the quarter-finals.

Beere began her Games with a 21-7 victory over Canada’s Jordan Kos and followed that up with a very impressive 21-11 success over Australia’s Ellen Ryan, who had beaten the other group member Eunice Wambui Mbugua 21-7 earlier in the day.

Beere will face Mbugua in her final group match this morning.

Meanwhile, in the triathlon at Sutton Park, Josh Lewis clocked 55min. 13sec. as he placed 23rd out of 44 finishers in the sprint distance race won by England’s Alex Yee in 50-34.

Lewis had a strong swim and exited the water in the top 15, just ahead of the eventual race winner, but fatigue started to tell on the bike leg.

The Guernseyman ended up recording splits of 8-47 for the swim, 27-44 on the bike and 17-23 for the run.

‘I had a decent swim, to be honest,’ said Lewis.

‘I came out with Alex so I was in the mix, and then, I don’t know whether it was a bit of a fight in the swim and it just spent me a little bit too much, but when I got on the bike I was like “augh, this is not going to go well”.

‘I was filled up with lactic, it was really tough that I was around my teammates from Wales and they were going really well and I was like “I literally can’t come through here, my legs are absolutely spent”. As soon as we hit the hill, I was hanging on for dear life and then got spat out after the first lap, got picked up by the second group and I was in survival mode from then on.

‘It was just a tough, honest course. I did my best, I could not have done much more, I was really pleased with how I went, but a disappointing result. I don’t think I had much more in the tank.’

There were some outstanding performances on the first day in the Sandwell Aquatics Centre pool, including a new Island women’s 100m butterfly record of 1-02.37 from Orla Rabey.

There were also big PBs from Samuel Lowe in the 400m freestyle (4-14.62) and Ronny Hallett in the 200m breaststroke (2-26.46).

Laura Le Cras was just four hundredths of a second outside her Guernsey 50m breaststroke record as she touched in 33.09sec. which saw her progress to the semi-finals, while Molly Staples clocked 1-07.54 in the 100m butterfly and Charlie-Joe Hallett clocked 2-24.01 in the 200m breaststroke.

The mixed 4x100m freestyle relay team of Tatiana Tostevin, Jon Beck, Orla Rabey and Ronny Hallett came fourth in their heat in 3-48.97 to set the first Island record in the event.

They beat Uganda, Barbados, Samoa and St Helena in doing so.