AS OF THIS month, Aaron Sexton is officially off track.
At the start of the summer, Ireland’s fastest schoolboy was named among the year one recruits in the Ulster Rugby academy. Yet he was still in sprint competition right up the recent European U20 Championships.
His personal bests stand at 10.43 seconds over 100m and 20.69 over 200, not all that far off the Olympic qualifying standards, but his final bow on the longer distance was a 21.18 run to fourth place in the European final in Sweden.
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Trained by his father Roger, himself no slouch as he continued racing at Masters level until quite recently, Sexton is three weeks shy of his 19th birthday and an imposingly strong figure standing 6’2″.
In time he will make that power count in senior 15-a-side rugby, but the medium-term plan for Sexton is to link up with the Ireland Sevens squad. He will be a valuable addition in their maiden World Series campaign and what promises to be a tough final bid for the 2020 Olympics when the World Repechage rolls around.
Watching a series of high-tempo, gruelling drills and match scenarios unfold at Ulster’s Abbey Academy training base of Newforge, Sexton looks out of place in open-field patterns. He is a cut above.
This is not a speedster who is being converted to rugby. This is a rugby player who is athletically gifted.
More than his straight-line speed, the impressive thing about Sexton is his agility. With or without the ball, there is a grace about his lateral movement and he steps tacklers with sublime cut and thrusts that leave them grasping at hot, heavy air.
After catching his breath and rehydrating from a punishing sun-drenched session in Belfast, Sexton looks like a man who is utterly thrilled that he has settled on rugby as his sport of choice. However, not a split second on the track feels wasted for the Bangor bullet.
“It had sort of been looming over me for a few years,” Sexton says of the decision to finally specialise on the field rather than the track.
“There are a lot of sacrifices of course, and you have to be so disciplined and I have given up a lot of things. By the end of last year after a few of the matches and stuff, it was an easy choice to go for the rugby.”
He made the decision easy on himself with his performances for Ulster A and seven tries in six outings for the province’s second-string. The province didn’t leave him to his own devices either, calling him up last summer to train as a 17-year-old.
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“It was a bit of a shock to the system, but it was a nice shock. I guess I was doing something right. I can’t complain, now.
“Everyone was so welcoming. All the seniors, the likes of Stuart McCloskey and Craig Gilroy were both looking out for you, everyone looked out for you. I learned so much last year I cannot fault anything with it.”
“The first meeting, I was one of the first ones in… the Irish boys were in camp at the time. Then a couple of weeks later you see Jacob Stockdale walking past – not long after scoring seven tries in the Six Nations! Yeah, I was a bit speechless at times, but he has helped me out a couple of times.