AFP reportsBritain's Hayley Yelling won the European Cross Country Championship here on Sunday just weeks after ending her year-long retirement from athletics.
The 35-year-old quit the sport after finishing a lowly 19th in last year's corresponding race in Brussels and she had only been back in training for a month when she lined up at Dublin's Santry Park course.
But the 2004 European champion led from start to finish in the 8,018 metres race and won by seven seconds from Spain's Rosa Morato.
Adrienne Herzog of the Netherlands was third.
"It was fantastic. I think retirement is the way forward but I guess I'm not retired any more," said Yelling.
"It wasn't a deliberate tactic to go to the front, it was just that I wanted to run hard and see how far I could go," she added.
The men's race was a much closer affair, with Britain's former European champion Mo Farah carried off on a stretcher after finishing second to Spain's Ethiopian-born Alemayehu Bezabeh, who only broke clear in the closing 500m of the 9,997m race.
Defending champion Sergiy Lebid was third, well behind the leading duo.
Spain won the men's team competition with Great Britain second and Italy third while defending women's champions Portugal retained their title ahead of Great Britain and Spain.
ShareThis