Junior Worlds – from Aaron Gate

The campaign started off with heading down to Invercargill at the beginning of week 6 in term 2, to re-commence the New Zealand Junior team training that had started a couple of months back. After training in cold and wet conditions (as low as 3 degrees recorded by a bike speedometer) out on the road and in the slightly warmer covered Velodrome, spending up to and in excess of 5 hours a day on a bike, every day, for one and a half weeks, we made our way over the Perth.

The warm, sunny weather made training a lot better, but was still just as hard if not harder, as the coaches prepared the team for the tough competition ahead. I suffered a crash after only being on the track for 5 days over there, where a mechanical error of the chain coming off and locking up the rear wheel at 55km/h left me grazed and the bike and rear wheel smashed. The team manager was able to arrange a new bike that the Australian Senior Team had been using as a spare to be transferred over to me, in a more stand out yellow than everyone else's black bikes, which arrived the next day from Adelaide. So after having the many wood splinters removed from my upper thigh and wounds patched up, I had to resume training the very next day, on the new bike.

The final part of the journey then came after spending almost 3 weeks in Perth on the long flight to South Africa, into Cape Town. After working out the final technical aspects of the different track, racing was underway. I was in the first heat on the first day of racing in the Junior World Track Cycling Championships, in the race against the clock: the individual pursuit. I passed the Dutchman on the other side of the track, setting a new personal best time of 3min28 sec for the 3km race, holding an average speed of close to 52km/h, which got me 5th place in the world, and only 6 seconds behind the current world record holder.

The following day was the big one, the Teams Pursuit, what all the training and build up had been towards. We flew out of the starting gates with me on the front, lapping off one by one each lap for the 4km race. We qualified 3rd fastest with a time of 4min24sec, which put us up against France in the ride off for the bronze medal. It was a very close race, but New Zealand just managed to edge in front winning by only 4/10ths of a second, winning us the bronze medal.