AAP
The daughter of a two-time AFL premiership winner and a boy who left Sudan at the age of four were among those putting their hands up as future athletics stars at the Australian Youth Olympic Festival (AYOF) on Saturday.
Molly Blakey registered a personal best of 54.69sec to win the 400m, her pet event, and then proceeded to overtake New Zealand's Zoe Hobbs in the final leg of the 4x100m relay.
A fair result given Hobbs had earlier collected the gold medal in the individual 100m.
"This was about 10 minutes after running the 400. I think she was running on adrenaline, it was fantastic," Kylie Wheeler, Australia's athletics team leader at the AYOF, said.
"I think she's only just starting to realise her potential. Almost every time in the past three months she's stepped on the track and done a PB.
"Her coach is Penny Gillies, who's coached previous Olympians, so she's in a good training ground and she's obviously got good genetics with her father John (who won two AFL flags with North Melbourne).
"She can continue to improve and hopefully break 54 seconds."
It was Blakey's fourth qualifying time for July's under-17 world athletics championship in Ukraine.
"It's a pretty big PB so that run was as perfect as I could have hoped," said Blakey, who has Cathy Freeman's time of 49.11s at the Sydney Olympics written on her bedroom mirror.
"It's quite windy. I just wanted to win gold to be honest, I didn't care about the time."
Abu Ganaba, who lived in Sudan until the age of four then spent four years in Egypt before landing in Sydney, registered a time of 10.88s in the 100m despite a headwind and a niggling groin injury.
"It felt good. I was hoping for 10.7s but I didn't get there," Ganaba said.
His time was 0.13s off the qualifying mark for the under-17 world athletics championship.
But underlying the 16-year-old's raw talent is the fact he's only been training for six months under Robert Bengal, athletics coach at his school Patrician Brothers' College.
In Saturday's field events, Matthew Denny and Yasenaca Denicaucau were both standouts.
Denny, 17, threw a personal best of 79.26 metres in the hammer throw to improve on the national youth record he set last month.
Denicaucau also had a personal best of 15.76m in the shot put, recording a fourth world youth championships qualifier and breaking the AYOF record previously held by Dani Samuels, who won gold in the discus at the 2009 world championships.
The AYOF, which has drawn almost 1500 young athletes to Sydney, has previously showcased the likes of Sally Pearson, Jared Tallent and Samuels.
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