BikeNZ Well Placed to Take Advantage of Olympic Changes

BikeNZ is well prepared to meet the new programme released today for the track programme at the London Olympic Games.

The IOC confirmed that the track programme will have an even gender split of five events of the sprint, team sprint, keiren, team pursuit and omnium. Dropped from the programme are the individual pursuit, points race and Madison.

While New Zealand has traditionally fared well in the individual pursuit, BikeNZ said their high performance team are well placed with development of the team pursuit, especially the new event for women.

And it has already met with success in the omnium with Christchurch’s Hayden Godfrey winning the world championship in the five-discipline event two years ago.

Three of New Zealand’s five Olympic medals have come in the individual pursuit with Gary Anderson winning bronze at Barcelona in 1992, Sarah Ulmer’s world record breaking gold medal at Athens in 2004 and Hayden Roulston’s silver medal at Beijing.

“It’s disappointing from the viewpoint of endurance track that the blue ribbon event of individual pursuit has gone along with the points race and Madison,” said BikeNZ High Performance Director, Mark Elliott.

“That said the even gender split is commendable and BikeNZ is well placed in regards to the women’s team pursuit with our team picking up the silver medal at the world championships this year. Our power to podium programme has identified a group of talented women and we have been developing them for a year now.

“It’s a disappointment for Alison Shanks as the reigning world champion, but let’s remember that we still have the world championships in all of these disciplines every year. And for us to have a successful teams pursuit programme we must have world class individual pursuit riders.

“The focus for us now will be to have balance across world championship outcomes and our Olympic outcomes.

“The addition of the women’s team pursuit opens more options for more women in our sport to compete at the highest level.”

Mr Elliott said the details of the five-event omnium have not been released yet including the distances for the event with the current make-up of 200m time trial, 5km scratch race, 3km individual pursuit, 15km points race and 1km time trial to be reviewed.

The UCI is to study changes to the omnium so that it becomes more of an endurance event.

Elliott said his coaching team will await those changes but already have some talented endurances riders well placed to mount a serious campaign in the omnium.

“For us it’s a matter of getting our heads firmly around the new Olympic programme and preparing for it. In that regard our team has much of the planning already done to take these options into consideration.

“And at the same time we still have all of these traditional endurance events on the programmes for the Commonwealth Games next year and the world championships every year, so they will still be important in our track programme.”