Monday, July 29, 2013

An exciting chapter ahead

This week’s Cycling Southland annual general meeting presents a formal opportunity to look back at the last 12 months and look forward to the club’s next exciting chapter.

There’s little debate the past year has been the biggest in our club’s history, headlined by hosting the 2012 UCI Juniors Track World Championships. It took a massive investment from both our volunteer base and from our financial reserves but like any good investment, it will pay dividends for years to come.

The best part about last year’s success is that it is shared by all those who have contributed over Cycling Southland’s rich history to put a little cycling club in the position to contribute as the single largest funder to the event. The countless and tireless years of service from names like Ineson, Sycamore, Tall, Ross, Broad, Canny and co, laid the foundation for the current crop (which includes all of the afore-mentioned names) to put Cycling Southland, the SIT Zero Fees Velodrome and Invercargill on the world track cycling map.

Preparations are being finalised for an elite track cycling event in November to be staged in the city to continue to build on this hard-earned reputation. So, don’t for a minute think we are suffering a Junior Worlds hangover and slowing down any!

Whilst we are on the topic of future events, entries opened for both our junior and senior Tours of Southland over the last fortnight. The 30th Yunca Junior Tour is first up from October 4 to 6, with the senior edition to be held November 3 to 9.

But before we hit the highways on our road tours later in the year, we have the WHK Corporate Pursuit over the next two weekends. Last week’s finals of the Lone Star Speights Corporate Roller Racing provided a sneak preview on who will start as the bookies favourite.

Seven teams were back to take on the team effort after qualifying over the past four weeks. The finals saw four teams move through to the finale’s ride-off, after setting times up to ten seconds quicker than they had achieved in the previous weeks’ heats.

In the end, the inaugural champion was Fonterra, taking the title by a slim 0.504 seconds from AWS Legal with NZ Fire Service a close third. All three teams recorded record-breaking individual efforts with times in the 22 second range over the 500 metre distance.

Our 30 corporate teams now shift their focus to the WHK Time Trial on Sunday (4th August) before the knock out finals competition is held on Sunday 11th.

The first team to measure themselves against the clock this Sunday will be the Colac Bay Tavern at 12:25pm. Three hours later, we will know who will be contesting the division 1 and 2 honours on Finals day. 

Based on what we’ve seen at the Lone Star on the rollers over the last month, it should be an outstanding contest. Entry is by gold coin with children free over both velodrome race days.

Nick Jeffrey is Cycling Southland's Chief Executive

Monday, July 15, 2013

Luck has nothing to do with it

This week we were paid a visit by a couple of good blokes from up north somewhere who wanted to get a handle on how one of these velodrome things worked. They were looking at the feasibility of building a similar community facility for their home patch.

Our two visitors timing couldn't have been better as they watched a class from James Hargest being put through their paces in an NCEA-accredited track cycling course on the track, while another group bounced around in the courts in the middle of the track and both lounges upstairs hosted corporate meetings and workshops.

I used to think Invercargill was lucky to have a facility of this quality, but now I realise that luck has nothing to do with it. Those visionary sport and community leaders and funders didn't roll the dice and just hope for the best a decade ago. They did their homework, didn't cut corners and built a facility that delivers at all levels - from international high performers to local students trying track for the first time. It provided a great example to our northern visitors and it is again emphasised by some of the cycling activities over this past week.

Eddie Dawkins continued to dominate to sprinting world. After a string of solid performances in Europe he backed up from an arduous travel schedule to win both the keirin and sprint on consecutive nights at the International Track Series in Adelaide this week. If their medal-winning deeds at the last two world championships announced NZ's arrival as an international cycling sprint powerhouse, the effort this off-season, lead by Eddie (along with Cycling Southland's Matt Archibald) has put an exclamation point on it.

Earlier this week Jeremy Presbury and Josh Haggerty flew out to Europe where they will link with Alexandra's Liam Aitcheson and the rest of the nine-strong BikeNZ squad to complete preparations ahead on next month's UCI Junior World Track Championships in Glasgow. Jeremy will line up as the number one ranked junior keirin rider in the world - in case you glossed over that last sentence, go back and re-read it now! All three travel as realistic medal prospects and they've had the luxury of building up on a world class facility here in Invercargill.

Southlanders also performed with distinction at this weekend's South Island Secondary Schools Road Cycling Champs at Ruapuna. Hamish Keast took double gold in the U14 boys while Tom Sexton took out the U16 road race title in bitterly cold conditions yesterday, backing up from his individual bronze and team gold during Saturday's time trials. Sam Miller, Hamish Beadle, Brayden Stephens, Hayden and Corbin Strong, Nick Kergozou and Josh van den Arend also stepped on to the podium over the weekend.

It's another long list of outstanding results from a random week in the year and one way or another, they can be linked to the foresight of those a decade ago who decided Invercargill could build an indoor velodrome, when no-one else had. Good idea that!

Nick Jeffrey is Chief Executive of Cycling Southland

Monday, July 8, 2013

End of the off-season

The handful of weeks that can loosely be described as the off-season at Cycling Southland are over with the restart of our weekend club road racing series on Saturday.

Not that it's been a restful time for the club. Plans are in place for the 2013 WHK Corporate Pursuit with our 29 teams circling the velodrome as they learn the ropes and refine their combinations ahead of next month's race days. Final details are being confirmed for Cycling Southland's hosting of two international track cycling events in November (watch this space) and there's the small matter of continuing preparations for our junior and senior cycling tours of Southland.

The Junior Tour will be held from October 4 to 6 and will again be headlined by one of Southland's longest running sponsorships by Yunca Heating. The Yunca Tour has become a rite of passage for New Zealand's best road talent locally and nationally for the best part of 30 years. Even in the short three-year history I've seen first-hand, it is obvious the role this event and Yunca's outstanding on-going support plays in developing the country's most promising riders into talents who have the opportunity to take those skills on a world stage.

The other feature of the last week was the announcement of Cycling Southland's partnership with Road Safety Southland.

The Share the Road message has been a fixture in the Tour of Southland peloton over recent years but this year the message will not be confined to one team, but the entire event with Road Safety Southland becoming a major feature sponsor for this year’s Tour.

Road Safety Southland Road User Safety Advisor Jane Ballantyne, her off-sider Maureen Deuchrass, Sport Southland and our outstanding local Police Education Officers have done a great job delivering this vitally important message over recent years and together we're all committed to continuing to share the same road, same rules, same rights message as widely as possible.

A few words from Jane herself. “We’ve been delighted with the profile the team has provided us over the last few years, but this new partnership gives us the chance to re-energise the Share the Road message in New Zealand’s most recognised cycling event. With more bikes on the roads, this message becomes increasingly important and to do it with Cycling Southland through the Tour and through the year makes perfect sense.”

Our Tour of Southland partnership is only the first step in an on-going relationship with Road Safety Southland. Share the Road is a shared responsibility. Too often the debate becomes a cyclist verses motorist one or vice versa when cyclists, motorists and pedestrians all have a job to do to keep themselves and each other safe. This isn’t going to be told over a couple of weeks every November, it’s a year-round message and one we both plan to have front and centre throughout the entire year.
There's no better place to start than as we build-up and then deliver New Zealand's feature road cycling event.

Nick Jeffrey is Chief Executive of Cycling Southland

Monday, July 1, 2013

Tour time leaves no time for sleep

With the 2013 Tour de France beginning in Corsica on Saturday night (NZ time), so too began a month of sleep deprivation for cycling fans.

The 100th Tour began in suitably dramatic fashion and fortunately the British and Irish Lions and Wallabies played ball with a horrendously stop-start rugby match on the other channel (at least for the first 70 minutes) which allowed for plenty of time watching the Tour peloton settle in for its 3,600 kilometre journey over the next three weeks.

I managed to get to about 1:30am before bed called and thanks to the marvels of modern technology (more commonly called MySky) I dragged myself up the hall, safe in the knowledge that a replay of the predicted opening stage sprint would be only a few button pushes away in the morning.

Anyone who organises events will tell you they lie awake at night, not worrying about the things they have planned for, it's those eventualities you can't plan for that keep you from sleep. Things like a team bus getting wedged under the finish line, for example.

So as the leaders descended on the final kilometres of stage one, organisers were deflating tyres on the Orica-GreenEdge team bus so it could back up and get out of the way before 198 bike riders came down the finish straight at 75 clicks.

Fortunately, disaster was avoided - well mostly. Nervousness in the peloton during the opening days of the Tour is an annual fixture and these jitters, combined with a decision to move the finish line back to the three kilometre mark to avoid the Aussie bus, which was then reversed when said bus was unwedged, combined to create the perfect recipe for incident. Sure enough, within the final kilometres, wheels touched and down came a large number of riders.

New Zealand's Greg Henderson and Jack Bauer negotiated the carnage, although Hendy, a key lead-out man for Lotto Belisol team mate Andre Greipel was not short of a word after the stage, telling ITV, "It was just ridiculous. We hear the finish line is at 3km so we just go, full. Then we hear at 3km that it's back at the original. We'd already used two men on the lead-out. It's not ideal."

That's the beautiful thing about the Tour. Just when you think you've seen it all over 100 years of racing, it reminds you that you can't miss a moment.

It also reminds us that our own iconic road race, the Tour of Southland will no doubt again provide drama and surprise. 120 of New Zealand's best bike riders over 900 kilometres never goes exactly to script and, just like the slightly more famous French version, it will throw up another week of spectacular action in November.

The first of our exciting announcements leading in to the 2013 Tour of Southland comes in these very pages later this week. That upcoming news and the start of le Tour over the weekend ratcheted up the excitement levels another notch.

Nick Jeffrey is Cycling Southland's Chief Executive