Ambitious Maggie Coles-Lyster working toward 2020 Olympics
Maggie Coles-Lyster is going into Canadian track nationals with a four-year plan. The 16 year old from Maple Ridge, B.C., hopes to be at the Olympics in 2020. To get there, she plans to be at the upcoming world championships in all three disciplines she races: road, cyclocross and track.
Coles-Lyster says, “All three disciplines are so different. I have fun with each of them, so it keeps my year really varied and enjoyable. Out of them all, I probably enjoy track the most.” At the Canadian junior track nationals, April 1–3 at the Milton velodrome, she’s planning to ride in all the events.. “I just want to show my skill over the full range of races and show Cycling Canada what I can do.”
With most of her pre-season preparations taking place on the track in Burnaby, B.C., she’s also able to get out on the road. “We’ve had some spring series club races back in B.C.,” she says. “They were tough because I was focusing on cyclocross and track. Doing two- to three-hour road races was bit a bit of a shock at first, but my form is coming back.”
To supplement all the work she does on the bike, Coles-Lyster trains two or three times a week in the gym, “I do yoga and work on my flexibility, which I find really helps with avoiding injury, staying nimble and relaxing.”
All that work is part of a bigger plan. “Track will be my big goal for the 2020 Olympics, hopefully the omnium. The next step is to qualify for junior worlds, and then do it again next year. After that, I will move up to the elite category. I want to do as many international races as I can for the experience. Once I am elite, we will see how that’s going.”
Coles-Lyster earned a spot on the junior cyclocross national team that competed in Zolder, Belgium at the end of January. There she rode with Canadian junior ‘cross champion Ruby West. “We know each other well having spent two weeks together racing in Belgium,” she said. The two also find themselves going head to head. They’ll be competing against one another on the track in Milton this weekend, and likely at road nationals this summer. “We mesh really well together. We have very similar race ability. We both do track, road and ’cross. We are in the same phases of our season at the same time, pretty much in the same form, so there is good competition between us.”
>> Read our full profile of Ruby West
As a busy Grade 11 student, Coles-Lyster also balances her school work. “I’m really proud: I got a lot of work done on the plane.” She missed school for ’cross worlds and again is away from school for nationals. “The teachers are really good: they accommodate my travelling and racing,” she said. “It’s hard. I take a full course load. I have eight courses to keep track of. I stay pretty caught up, while my friends keep me posted and I stay in contact with my teachers while I am away.”
Her ambitions recently got bigger with news that Cycling Canada will allow first-year juniors to go to both track and road worlds this year. She says, “Now that they are opening it up to first years, a big goal of mine will be to compete in all three of the world championships.” Coles-Lyster is pretty ambitious and her hard work is paying off. In her first event at this weekend’s national championships, she earned a gold medal in the junior women’s team sprint.
