Hot competition for BikeNZ track cyclists at Melbourne World Cup
The BikeNZ track cycling team face their strongest opposition since last year’s world championships in the UCI World Cup in Melbourne starting on Thursday.
Most of the stars from the three world track powerhouses of Great Britain, Denmark and hosts Australia are among the 40 national and trade squads competing in the three day meet.
BikeNZ national coach Tim Carswell has set lofty heights for his 14-strong squad at the meet, both wanting to look at a number of different combinations but at the same time perform well with the meet offering key qualifying points for next year’s world championships.
Carswell will be looking at some of the new members of the squad in their first hitouts at this level including Invercargill’s Tom Scully, Waikato’s Rushlee Buchanan, veteran Joanne Kiesanowski and the burgeoning sprint trio of Eddie Dawkins, Adam Stewart and Simon Van Velthooven.
There will also be interest in the performance of world junior sprint champions Sam Webster and Ethan Mitchell who are riding for the G-Race trade team.
“We definitely want to go well here this week. There are some important qualifying points here for the world championships and there’s an expectation we should qualify in the top four in our targeted events of the men’s and women’s pursuits, both team and individual,” Carswell said.
“We have some new faces with us and we will see how they step into the training regime and racing at this level.
“And we have some new potential combinations. We have not decided on line-ups because of the considerable depth that we now have across our key events.
“We also must decide if we will take the risk of a potential gold medal in the team events by resting a key rider to be fresh for the medal ride at night.
“We still got a bit to decide on but at the same time I am quite excited at the prospects.”
Carswell says times may not be faster than at last week’s Oceania Championships at the ILT Velodrome with the track at the Hisense Arena sluggish in their two training sessions so far.
“It’s not as quick as Invercargill track. We are hoping the weather hots-up a bit and it can get faster as the competition begins.”
They know that the opposition will be in form this week.
Great Britain are competing with a strong squad including three of the men’s team pursuit led by Ed Clancy that went 3:54.395 at the recent Manchester World Cup, the second fastest team pursuit in history.
“There are a lot of people, especially the Kiwis and the Aussies, who want to knock us off our perch,” Clancy said. “We’ve still got to push forward and we’ve set our sights pretty high with trying to go sub 50 (sub three minutes 50 seconds for the 4000m team pursuit) in the next couple of years.”
The men’s team pursuit has also attracted the current world champions of Denmark and a young but talented Australian team headed by world points race champion Cameron Meyer.
The sprinters will come up against Olympic silver medallist in the keirin Ross Edgar (GBR) and world sprint silver medallist Azizul Awang (MAL) and Australian Shane Perkins as front runners.
Scully, still in the under-23 ranks, will race the points race and Madison, most likely with Marc Ryan, while world champion Alison Shanks and Jesse Sergent have booked the individual pursuit berths.
Kiesanowski, who races for Team TIBCO on the roads in USA, is having her first serious tilt on the track in the scratch and points races.
Carswell said sprint coach Justin Grace has still to confirm his riders for the sprints but it’s likely than Van Velthooven will ride the keirin, Dawkins and kilo time trial with two riders to be selected for the sprints.
Competition begins on Thursday with New Zealand to contest the men’s points, women’s individual pursuit, men’s team sprint, men’s individual pursuit and women’s scratch race. Friday sees the women’s points, men’s team pursuit, Keirin, men’s scratch, men’s kilo time trial with the final day on Saturday featuring the men’s Madison, men’s sprint, women’s team pursuit and men’s Madison.