Update from Panamerican Championships

The Panamerican Road Championships are on this weekend in Aguascalientes, Mexico. The two days of racing features an individual time trial that happened on Saturday May 8 and Sunday’s road race.

The Canadian women racing at this continental championships, started the weekend off with some decent form. Laura Brown, who was added to the team on short notice due to an injury to Tara Whitten (broken elbow) raced to a fifth place finish in the time trial. Brown, who has been focusing primarily on the track this season, racing in the team pursuit in the Track World Cup and World Championships, says, “I have some work to do on my TT bike this summer since my winter was devoted to the track. I don’t feel that strong on the climbs yet. So I’m pretty pumped on my 5th placing. And due to unfortunate circumstances about Tara I was given the opportunity and I wish her well. I was pretty excited this morning as I have been wanting to do a time trial for a while.” Also competing in the time trial was Denise Ramsden, fresh off a solid block of racing in Europe with the Canadian National Team. Unfortunately for Ramsden, she was plagued with some bad luck in the time trial, losing a contact lens and crashing, but through this all, she finished in 11th place.

Joining Brown and Ramsden for Sunday’s road race are Numainville and Stephanie Roorda. On the men’s side, Charles Dionne and Jean-Michel Lachance are toeing the line for the men

On the track side, the track team is also in Aguascalientes and has had their first training session on the new 250 meter wood Velodrome. The track sits at 1889m of altitude in a pressurized bubble and is still under final construction. Daniele Defranceschi commented on the team’s first training session, “We got up on the track and did our usual warm up and the feeling in our lungs was not that great. We think it’s more of the combination of dry air inside the velodrome with saw dust particles that gave us the coughs. The men endurance riders did one flying 2k team pursuit effort in our warm up gear with half lap changes to get use to the corners and we were done for the day after a quick cool down. The sprinters did a few jumps and were also done for the day. Tomorrow we will throw on some big gears and try to go fast for the first time. We’re all excited for that.”

The track competition starts on Tuesday May 11, with the following Canadian athletes:

Monique Sullivan (AB)
Travis Smith (AB)
Laura Brown (BC)
Stephane Cossette (QC)
Steph Roorda (BC)
Joseph Veloce (ON)
Daniele Defranceschi (ON)
Remi Pelletier-Roy (QC)
Mark MacDonald (AB)
Jean-Michel Lachance (QC)