EVER since he could walk it was pretty clear to his family that active Somerville youngster Aiden Hinson was going to be an athlete.
Their assumptions were right, and the almost 19-year-old has spent his formative years fine tuning his athletic skills in a range of track and field sports and football and competed in jumps at state and interstate level.
He and training partner Blake Shaw are set for the experience of a lifetime and will head to Cali, Colombia in August for the World Athletics U20 Championships.
Hinson, a triple jumper, qualified last year, but Athletics Australia – along with many other countries, decided not to send a team due to COVID.
Hinson’s mother Monica said the two boys had recently competed in the National Track and Field Competition in Sydney and won the chosen events with qualifying jumps – both necessary to be able to attend U20 competition.
Both athletes are juggling full time university studies, working part time jobs and training at Ballam Park, Frankston on more than three days a week.
Monica said Aiden cut his athletic teeth at Western Port Little Athletics Hastings in the under-6s before transferring to seniors at Frankston, and those early days set him up for bigger and better things.
“He has always been interested in track and field, and had to make a choice at one stage between playing football and staying with jumps, and he chose jumps,” she said.
Hinson was a member of the Dandenong Stingrays under-16 development squad before choosing jumps.
“I asked him the other day what it was about jumps and he said it’s different, it’s challenging and it’s fun.”
Hinson was national under-16 long jump champion in 2018, and in 2019 he made it into Australian athletics history, breaking a 30-year triple jump record at the Australian All Schools Championships in Cairns, with 14.55m jump.
In 2021, he won a gold medal in the men’s under-20 triple jump at the Australian Track and Field Championships.
First published in the Western Port News – 25 May 2022
