Track Nationals

Sprints

One of my weakest events of all the four events in my omnium, the sprints are actually two events but count as one. The first event is a flying 200 meter time trial. In my warm up I was able to do a 13.2 sec

ond 200. Although that sounds slow, for me that was a personal best and I did it even with a lot of other people on the track. This was good news to me. I was hoping with no people on the track and the legs fully warmed up, I would be able to go even faster. Once I was on the track for the real deal, I had three laps to wind up and do the 200 meters. I felt that I had a g

ood wind up, but when I stood to jump, I had the jitterbugs,I tensed up and sat down too early. I was not able to get up to max speed and did a 13.7. The flying 200 is used to seed people for the match sprints (a two or three lap (depends on the track) race between two people) but only the top eight from the flying 200 were chosen to move on to the match sprints. So I did not make it onto the match sprints, which was a bummer but I still had three more races: the scratch race, points race, and 500 meter time-trial.

Scratch Race

My next race was a 32 lap scratch race, but before that I had to place in the top eight of my heat that morning. I was able to make it into the final and decided that I wanted to try and break away to get some omnium points. In the race I tried attacking repeated times, but was unsuccessful. One group of about four riders was able to get a gap and get away, but they were pulled back in. By now I knew it was probably come down to a sprint and I also knew that I could not out sprint the top guys, but I could hang onto their wheels and still get some omnium points. With a little over two to go, the pace started to pick up and lucky

for me I was toward the front with the top guys. When we hit the back side of the track with one and a half laps to go, the sprint started. My legs were now feeling my attacks from earlier in the race, a

nd I was not able to stay with the leaders and was floating towards the back of the group. I ended up finishing 12th place with no omnium points.

Points Race

See video.

500 Meter Time Trail

My last event for my omnium, was a 500 meter time trial. Not one of my strongest events because of the standing start, but I was hoping that I would be able to at least hold onto my podium position for the omnium. I had been working on my start for most of the year, I was just hoping all the work would pay off. When I got to starting block, I was informed that the other rider that was starting on the other side of the track was warned for delaying the start, and the official also told me to just relax. I was not even clipped in and the 20 second count down went off. I guess the starter thought both myself and the other rider were ready. Lucky for me though, I was able to get clipped in and all set before the last ten seconds of the count down. My form was okay in my start, but I just could not get as fast as the top guys. I ended up doing a 39.668 second 500, which was a personal best for me, but Corey Williams won it with a time of 36.025! This meant he had 10 omnium points and I only had 7. Thankfully I was able to hold onto 5th place and still make it on the podium.

Team Sprint

Just for fun, and hopefully another medal, Joel and myself decided to try and find another person and do the team sprint. We did the event last year, with Daniel Farinha (SJBC) This year Daniel was doing it with two of his teammates (Eddie Zhang, and Vincent Juarez both on SJBC) We were able to convince the 3rd place rider in the Kilo, Danny Hiller (5280 Magazine) to be our 3rd rider. We decided to have Joel first, myself second, and Danny third. We qualified 2nd place with a time of 54.947 seconds. This meant that we moved onto the gold round in the final and could possibly win a gold medal. We just needed to go four seconds faster to match the first place team’s qualifying time. In the final we improved our time by a 1/2 of a second to a 54.443, but the first place team did a 49.724! So we got a silver medal, but we were not complaining, it was much shinier than the bronze medals!

15/16 overall omnium
Points Race Final
Team Sprint