Dulwich Hill Bicycle Club

After a years break. Yesterday saw Team DHBC Sprint return to action for the 4th time in five years with the introduction of two new riders. As with any team event the first hurdle is always finding three riders available on the correct date free from sickness, weddings, girlfriend/wife commitments, parenting or any any other distraction. This year we hit this event with the goal of two teams with the small problem that the 'A team' forgot to Enter, so it was up to the 'B team' to carry the club flag!

The team sprint or the olympic sprint as it is otherwise known is a great event to introduce riders to the State Championships. For Anthony and Nathan this meant not only a chance to attempt to flex their leg muscles to max capacity when the cameras were aimed in the right direction but also put those leg muscles to good use. When setting this team up I had the thought that I knew Anthony always struggles with any events over one lap in length and decided from previous experience that the second lap is always the toughest and decided that Anothony's 'go till you blow' style would be well suited to an explosion of power out of the gates with a spectacular death towards the end of the first lap. I had also been turning my attention to Nathan's form of training in recent weeks to notice he had been holding a good turn of speed whilst chasing the motor bike around the 65km/hr mark to know he would likely be strong over the second lap after a good wind up. I myself was not so sure how strong I could be in the final lap after my 1:17 kilo last week but in the back of my head was thinking 'well I did ok over 3 laps & I have done this a number of times before so why not?'

The goal for the day was the a time set three years ago of 0:54.191, set by the usual suspects of Alex, Tim & myself in our first ride together back in 2008 when Alex was first starting out. I decided that this was a good marker because though Alex may not have yet been at his best, Tim & myself were riding A grade at the time and were in reasonable form so it was a comparable match up. In qualifying Anthony flew out of the blocks like a man possessed leaving myself on the back foot chasing. Nathan got on and then I was on heading into the third straight just as Anthony's gas cylinder was all out of nitro, leaving Nathan with the job of re-firing the engines. Nathan did well to wind it up, leaving me with a bit of work to do to find top speed only to find myself with the same stiffness as a week ago. After Nathan was sure we would be closer to the 0:58 mark we found ourselves much better off clocking a time 0:54.285 only marginally missing our target!

In one sense we were lucky and in another not so, as since there were only 3 teams Southern cross U/19 unusually were promoted to Elite which meant we would not receive a bronze medal but did mean we had one more ride to fight out the bronze. We were placed to race against Hunter district who had qualified in a respectable 0:50.302, narrowly missing out on the gold medal ride off behind St George in 0:50.116 & Southern Cross in 0:49.599. It was back to the chalk board to reassess our team tactics. Primarily the noticeable problem with our qualifying was that Anthony hit out a bit too quickly slowing towards the change and leaving Nathan on the back foot to re-accelerate. So Anthony was advised just to slow a little and aim for top speed at the change instead. This he did and did well, as we much more smoothly transitioned into formation. Nathan had a slight more consistency in his turn and I was able to pull together strong in the final lap giving us a much better run than the first time around. Though we may have been more fatigued, we were able to come home strong in a time of 0:54.04 putting us under our goal for the day!

All in all the boys rode well & had a lot of fun. I was very happy with our overall performance and though we were the DHBC 'b team' at the start of the day, I think our time would of left most people thinking we were the 'A team.'

Full results can be found here:
http://nsw.cycling.org.au/site/cycling/ ... esults.pdf

Was indeed a fun day... I learnt so much from just 2 minutes of racing Will definately be looking forward to this event again next year.

Photo's taken by Mark Gunter.

Some phone camera snaps taken on the day.

Simon prepping up.


Nathan prepping up.

Great write up and great pics!

SO focused!

Great racing guys and good to see you matched the Tim/Alex/Simon time (lets not worry about 0.1s)

I was a c grader when we set that Simon!

I was a c grader when we set that Simon!

Id only been riding track for a month and that was my first ever race on big red

Great report. But tell me, how did the 'A' team forget to enter?

very simple...! some silly person put me in charge of this organisational job, and then failed to remind me about it every day for the two months leading up to when I had to actually do the said job. Then on that weekend I was moving house, so I forgot, and we didn't enter. since I was only reminded about 4 or so times, I dont think its my fault. A good rule of thumb is that if you have told me less than 20x, you haven't told me. I'm more daft than could imagine.