Costly changes reinforce BikeNZ’s focus on Glasgow and Rio

BikeNZ has been forced to tweak their track cycling campaign after changes by the world ruling body the UCI for world championship and Olympic qualification.

The UCI now require team pursuit to be represented at every World Cup to qualify for the world championships and from there to the Olympic Games.

The other significant change is that the women’s team pursuit will now mirror that of the men, moving to four riders over 4000m, from the current three riders over 3000m.

“This will add some significant additional costs to our programme, that frankly we do not have,” said BikeNZ High Performance Director, Mark Elliott. “For a number of reasons we had already decided that our 2013 year would be more low-key across our entire campaign, and for the women’s endurance group it means they will be domestically based.

“These latest changes by the UCI really reinforce that our plans to bypass the World Cup this year for women’s team pursuit were prudent.

“Our overall goals remain unchanged which is to focus on the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow, and from early next year begin a world class and fully funded campaign from two and a half years out for the Rio Olympics.”

With no women’s team pursuit on the schedule for the Commonwealth Games, the programme for the female endurance riders is based in New Zealand and Australia.

“Their focus will be the individual endurance events at Glasgow and potentially some may compete at the world championships preceding that,” Elliott said. “From that point they will begin the major campaign to Rio for team pursuit and omnium.”

The men’s endurance squad are currently based in Belgium for a combination of a road campaign as well as World Cup events to qualify for next year’s world championships.

“They are a higher priority based on their world ranking and the team pursuit is on the schedule for Glasgow, so it is important for them to compete in next year’s world championships towards the Commonwealth Games.”

It is a similar situation for the sprint programme, with the men’s campaign based in Europe after their medal-winning performances at the world championships, while the women will be domestically based and need to force their way into international reckoning at the Oceania championships later this year.

Elliott said that the sport did not receive all the funding it sought which meant it had to make changes to accommodate the challenges of their development of world class programmes across men’s and women’s endurance and sprint programme in terms of resourcing and funding compared with what we faced after Beijing and in the lead up to London.

“Our other consideration is that we are planning for this year’s move to a centralised programme at the new Avantidrome in Cambridge.

“We want to be in a position to drive a broader programme in Cambridge and recognise we will make significant gains once at the Avantidrome but this will require a solid resourcing base.

He said BikeNZ is actively seeking potential sponsors for the team and to support the hosting of an annual UCI Tier One category track event which is also part of the new World Cup regulations.