A five-week intensive training camp at the UCI World Cycling Centre (WCC) in Aigle, Switzerland, has paid off with three athletes winning medals at the UCI Junior Track Cycling World Championships.
The Championships were held in Frankfurt (Oder), Germany, from August 14 to 18, and among the competitors were 13 young athletes from 10 countries who trained at the UCI WCC for five weeks prior to the event. They came away with one gold, one silver and one bronze medal.
The UCI WCC celebrations began with the first medal event on the programme in Germany, the Women’s Scratch Race: Chile’s Catalina Soto Campos claimed silver behind Australian Champion Ella Sibley.
Three days later, on Saturday, South Korea’s Youngkyun Park shone in the four-event Omnium. After the opening Scratch Race, Park started to come to the fore during the second event, the tempo race, where he finished second thanks to winning five sprints in a row from lap 20. This result put Park in third overall after two events and he held onto that position for the Elimination and points race to take World bronze behind Laurence Pithie (New Zealand) and Graeme Frislie (Australia).
In the women’s points race the same evening, Japan’s Tsuyaka Uchino refused to be destabilised by the USA’s Megan Jastrab, who outsprinted the field early on to win an initial five points. Uchino bided her time over the 80-lap 20km race to claim 41 points and Japan’s only medal of the Championships… a gold one!
UCI World Cycling Centre General Director Frédéric Magné commented: "Thanks to the expert coaching of our professional staff, the athletes who were selected to train at the UCI WCC before the Championships came on leaps and bounds in a short space of time, particularly when it came to tactics and skills.
“It is hugely gratifying to see their hard work transferred into results on the international stage. All our trainees performed extremely well and managed to meet the personal goals that were set with the coaches before the event.”
While nearly all the athletes who trained at the UCI WCC return to their respective countries this week, Catalina Soto Campos, one of the Centre’s long-term trainee athletes, is back in Aigle to prepare for the UCI Road World Championships in Yorkshire (GBR) in September.