TT cycling five ready for Pan Am ride

By STEPHON NICHOLAS Tuesday, May 11 2010

AFTER a week of preparation at the Home Depot Centre in Los Angeles, TT’s elite cycling team is in prime shape for the 2010 Pan American Cycling Championships scheduled to pedal off today in Aguascalientes, Mexico.

The team which consists of Adam Alexander, Azikiwe Keller, Haseem McLean, Njisane Phillip and Chris Sellier spent the last 11 days at the world renowned facility running through various drills and workouts designed to get them at peak form for the western hemisphere’s annual cycling championship.

All the riders are healthy going into the tournament, showing steady progress throughout the training camp as they adapted to the different physical and tactical demands required from indoor tracks.

The cyclists performed speed work behind a motorcycle, practiced with an official start gate system and worked on a variety of tactics needed to ease the transition from the large outdoor tracks as in TT to the shorter and faster ones that are being used in most international competitions. The local athletes qualified for the event through time trial results taken from the 2010 Easter Grand Prix and through stringent evaluations of previous international experience by the Racing Committee of the Trinidad and Tobago Cycling Federation (TTCF).

While in Los Angeles, TTCF High Performance Manager, Erin Hartwell, and TTCF vice-president of Racing Gregory D’Andrade hosted selection time trials for the three-man Team Sprint.

The pair selected Keller, Sellier and Phillip for the sprint which will open the competition today. Hartwell expressed confidence in a good performance by the TT team and noted that the camp has been very beneficial.

“I have been pleasantly surprised at how well this team has gelled in the last week. All of our riders have stepped up to the challenges in front of them and have conducted themselves as true professionals,” he said.

“While I expect good results, this is a group that I see doing great things in competitive cycling for years to come,” he added.

D’Andrade was also pleased with the camp and the level of intensity and concentration put in by the cyclists.

“This group of men has shown me that they genuinely want to be here, that they want to be competitive, and that they take representation of their country quite seriously. I can see that they mean business,” he noted.

 

---

Kierin - 4th place - Njisane Phillip

Scratch Race - 16th place - Adam Alexander

Caribbean Cycling continues to express congratulations to our team on their outstanding efforts thus far.