Cheatley overcomes surgery to make cycling team
Six months ago, Catherine Cheatley lay on a surgeon's table wondering if she would be able to ride at all in 2008. Yesterday, she was named in the New Zealand Olympic team for Beijing.
The 25-year-old Invercargill-based cyclist underwent a crucial operation to solve a movement-restricting circulation problem in her left thigh.
After coming back more quickly than expected, she has returned to form with her US Cheerwine road racing team and earned a place in the Olympic points race. Cheatley was one of six named in the team yesterday.
Tour de France competitor Julian Dean was confirmed as a starter in the road race, alongside Tim Gudsell and Glenn Chadwick in the men's road relay. Jo Kiesanowski will line up in the women's road race, while Peter Latham has been included in the men's team pursuit squad.
Kiesanowski may yet be joined in the road race by either or both of Cheatley and mountain bike rider Rosara Joseph, depending on the outcome of an appeal to cycling's world body, the UCI. New Zealand had initially earned enough points in international qualifying races to have three riders in the women's road race.
But New Zealand lost ranking points in two events which the UCI recently downgraded because they decided there hadn't been enough international competition.
Bike NZ high performance director Mark Elliott said a decision on the appeal was expected within the next few days. If the appeal was not successful, Elliott said he was confident Kiesanowski was more than capable of pushing towards the front of the peloton on her own anyway.
Rotorua-born Dean, who finished a hard-fought 15th in the tough Athens race, said he was honoured to be going to his fourth Olympics.
"I've completed my plan for the Olympics and hope that the Tour de France really sets me up well for Beijing which will be a really tough test."
Elliott said with the full cycling team named now he was excited by the mix of youth and experience. Top prospects include BMX rider Sarah Walker, and the track squad.
Copyright (c)2008, APN Holdings NZ Limited
Two more in line for track team
National track coach Tim Carswell will have to wait until next month to know if he can add to his team for the Beijing Olympics.
A seven-strong track team was confirmed last month but may yet see two more added to it when the New Zealand road team is announced next month.
The national body is waiting for the final International Cycling Union points to confirm how many spots it will have for the road race in Beijing on August 9 and 10.
Carswell is closely watching progress with the road team and expects to call on the services of possibly two riders to double up with track duties.
Christchurch cyclist Joanne Kiesanowski is the country's leading female road rider and is expected to be named for the 126.4km women's race which starts near the Forbidden City in Beijing and finishes at the Great Wall.
She would also be in contention for the points race on the track but may face competition from last year's world championship bronze medallist Cath Cheatley, should the latter be selected in the team.
Cheatley has been attempting to get back up to speed since a leg injury forced her out of action earlier this year.
She has been performing consistently since heading to the United States to push her case on the tarmac.
Kiesanowski has also been in good form for her professional team in the States, finishing fifth in the recent Mount Hood Classic which included Alison Shanks, who is already in the track team for the individual pursuit.
Carswell may also be able to call on Tim Gudsell for the track in Beijing with the Waikato cyclist pushing hard for a road spot.
Gudsell is one of two Kiwis cycling in the Giro d'Italia and is just two days from completing the famous tour for the first time.
He is riding for his professional team, Francaise des Jeux, and is expected to be named for the Olympic road race alongside New Zealand's top road cyclist, Julian Dean who is also competing in Italy with his Slipstream team.
Carswell said he was keeping in close contact with his track team which was scattered around the world in their build-up to Beijing.
The cyclists headed offshore last month with Shanks riding in the United States, as is Greg Henderson who is preparing for the Triple Crown series.
Henderson has also been in winning form, claiming a couple of stages at the Tour de Georgia where he picked up the sprinter's jersey.
New Zealand's remaining five track cyclists have just completed a road tour in Belgium and have two more tours to do before the full team gathers in France in mid-July for final track preparations.
The team will leave it as late as possible before flying into China for the start of the track campaign on August 15.
(c) Fairfax New Zealand Limited 2007
Nys looks at Beijing, early to Landbouwkrediet?
Sven Nys has returned from checking out the mountain bike course for the upcoming Beijing Olympics. "It is a good one for me," he told Het Laatste Nieuws and the Gazet van Antwerpen. "It's not as easy as everyone thinks." It also looks like he will leave Rabobank next month to join his new team of Landbouwkrediet.
"On the approach to the finish, there is not one flat metre," he said. "There is a lot of climbing." Weatherwise, he didn't get a good feel. "It is spring there now, with a comfortable 27 degrees. But it doesn't rain now, as is the case in August. And as for the humidity.... "
Concerning the pollution, he said, "In the mornings, the air is good and there is beautiful blue sky, but in the evenings you can't see across the street because of the smog. I hope that we ride in the morning."
Nys announced in April that he would ride for with Landbouwkrediet in the coming season, after 10 years with Rabobank. However, it now looks as if he will transfer sooner than expected. The Gazet van Antwerp reported that an agreement with Rabobank to let him go is in the works. "We are only waiting for a few signatures from the Netherlands to finish off the transition," explained Nys' manager, Bob Verbeeck.
Rabobank spokesman Luuc Eisenga said, "There is not yet anything official, but things can move quickly in the coming days."
Copyright Future Publishing (Overseas) Limited, a Future plc group company, 1995-2007. All rights reserved.
New co-sponsor for Lampre
Lampre established an important relationship with NGC Medical Spa, a few days before the start of Giro d'Italia. Staring with the Grand Tour around Italy, Lampre's official race jersey will spot NGC logo. There are plans to extend the sponsorship into next year.
NGC Medical is a leader in the health sector, specialising in the management of cardiology and heart surgery wards services. In addition, there are branches offering surgical devices, electromedical and telemedicine equipment and computer applications for hospital wards. NGC is also offering emergency air lifts as well as organ air transport.
"This agreement satisfies both parties," Giuseppe Saronni, Team Lampre's manager, said. "The team finds a sponsor that shows enthusiasm and passion for cycling; this is a good thing for us. NGC Medical will have the chance to live the Giro d'Italia's outstanding experience and, later in the season, support us in other races."
Copyrigth Future Publishing (Overseas) Limited, a Future plc group company, 1995-2007. All rights reserved.
CyclingQuotient, Cycling.TV, and the Glorious New Milennium
By chris
Posted on Mon May 05, 2008 at 12:22:07 AM EDT
Modern media rocks! Curious? On the flip...
This is basically a love sonnet to new media, and how it's completely changed the Cycling fan experience. Don't say you weren't warned.
Old Media Kicking, Screaming
The sports blogosphere was lit up this past week by Bob Costas' HBO special on sports and media, which featured a panel on the effects of the internet on sport. During the panel, Buzz Bissinger, representing the old school, unleashed a profanity-laced tirade against the internet at poor Will Leitch of Deadspin.com, a popular, cheeky sports site. Bissinger spewed forth a torrent of fear, hatred and arrogance, pretty much confirming what bloggers think mainstream media thinks of us, and the show itself was a parade of misinformation from people, Costas on down, who should have asked their kids how the internet works before going live. But enough; plenty of others have already plucked this low-hanging fruit.
Within 24 hours, over at FireJoeMorgan.com, a sports media watchdog site run by Hollywood comedy writers, bloggers had unearthed a year-old piece by Bissinger declaring that the path to a long, successful pitching career in baseball generally requires 400 innings of minor league experience. No less than six different bloggers researched the issue, several different ways (pre-MLB innings of the durable guys, of the injured guys, recent pitchers, historical pitchers) and demonstrated that no correlation between minor league innings and durability existed, whatsoever. Bissinger just made it up, or heard it somewhere, and was too lazy to conduct any research.
A Few Short Generalizations About Blogs
However much bloated ego freaks like Bissinger and the media class continue tripping over blogs, they can't escape the fact that the internet has completely transformed the fan's ability to watch sports. In a short time, the internet has transformed a one-way conversation to a giant, sprawling, shared web of inputs and outputs, in which you can find everything you need or want to know about a sport. Old-school media remains a large part of the equation by supplying information that only professional reporting can yield, but anyone with a computer has far more information about the events themselves, from live video to statistics, to websites where people sift through it all and try to learn something. Sports isn't magic, so it's hardly surprising that the best websites and blogs have had a great deal of wisdom to add.
It's not that old media was or is bad at its job; the key to the new era is the simple equation that 1000 people looking at something will figure out more than 100 people would. Those 100 people remain thoroughly relevant; they just don't have a monopoly on relevance anymore.
The Cycling Experience
Compared to, say, the NFL, Cycling is a simple and accessible sport. Strategies and schemes are often pretty predictable and easy to spot. Success is measured in naked results, which themselves are good predictors of future results. The athletes' experience is one that millions of amateurs can relate to on some level. And anyone with a computer (or TV, in Europe) can get the most important information -- live race video -- from the same feed being broadcast to the team cars and media centers.
Reporters are still vital for the more private information swirling around the teams and organizations like the UCI -- who's healthy or not, what changes to the sport are being considered, etc. Veteran reporters and broadcast commentators add still more value with their seasoned eye and appreciation for some of the sport's (few) subtleties... like who's showing early signs of cracking in a race.
But we fans are armed with two items that, especially in America, give us infinitely more tools to understand the sport than ever before: live or stored race video, and statistical information.
Cycling.TV, putting aside the technical bugs, has given the American audience its first ever look at entire races other than the Tour, whose live broadcasts in the US only preceded Cycling.TV by a few years. [Same goes for Canada too, I'm guessing.] Now, we fans can see a race from the start of the interesting part to its conclusion, with little interruption. We can watch tactics evolve over the entirety of a race and understand how the moves that led up to the winning move were just as vital. And thanks to Versus' highlights shows, we can compare the old-style cropped version to the full product and understand how, in years past, we were missing almost the whole show. [I like VS, they deliver what the market will support, but still...]
The other big piece is data. I grew up in an era where "data" meant Winning Magazine's months-later publication of some minimal list of results. A few big-city magazine stores might carry Velo or other European pubs, but realistically speaking there was NOTHING available apart from headlines about a few top guys in a few races. No startlists. No comprehensive results from big races. Nothing from smaller races where riders, especially the younger guys, are honing their form. Understanding the sport then was like trying to understand all of America by watching the presidential election.
The internet, in the form of CyclingQuotient, has changed all that for me. On just this one site (of many, no doubt) you can get entire race results from every event of consequence. You can see team rosters from the last five years. For each rider, you can see five years' worth of events all on a single screen. From this, a lot of useful information is gleaned: how his season is structured, where he tends to focus his energies, what types of races are suitable, how significant any one result is (by looking, as one legend once said, at who he beat or lost to).
I have spent years following and learning about this sport, but only recently began to feel like I might get it, and largely through these two new media. Previously, journos would always tell us that Cycling is a team sport, but rarely would they elaborate on what that meant: how races are animated by the lieutenants, the worker bees, the specialists, the young up-and-coming talents... dozens of guys from across the spectrum and pay scale of the sport. No fault of theirs; such details would never have fit into the limited space on the page. But now, I can see these less prominent riders with my own eyes. I can get on the internet and see how their past results have predicted what I just saw. I can write a post about how Rein Taaramae, who I'd never heard of before, might hang onto his GC place in Romandie because he had some nice time trial results in his no-longer-obscure past.
This is meaningful to me. Cycling (riding and watching) is my one last big private indulgence in a life otherwise occupied by family (yay!) and work (um, yay). The modern era has brought me closer than I could have imagined to my favorite distraction from real life. These few new tools have rescued me from a life of barking ignorantly at my friends about guys they've never heard of, to being more like a real fan. So for that,Cycling.TV, CyclingQuotient, rider and team websites, other blogs, VeloNews.com, CyclingNews, and you guys... this is my way of saying thanks, and of celebrating the modern age.
(c)2006 SportsBlogs, Inc.
Doping control back-ups in Frankfurt
The Rund um den Henninger Turm race in Frankfurt, Germany, had a large anti-doping programme, which in addition to testing the usual number of riders also included after-race testing of one randomly selected rider per team for a total of about 30 riders. Each rider had his own chaperon to watch over him during the wait, but there were only three doctors present to conduct the tests, so it came to delays and back-ups, which weren't always easy for the riders.
"We had no problems with the controls themselves," said Jose De Cauwer, Silence-Lotto team director, to Sportwereld. "But they could have been better organised, especially on an administrative level. Glenn d'Hollander, for example, could have immediately gone to the bathroom, but wasn't allowed to, because he had to wait for his turn. With his chaperon in tow, he returned to the hotel to take a shower and to use the toilet, which he urgently needed to do. That meant another three-quarter hour wait until he had enough 'production' to go again. All in all it took an hour and a half for his control. And he was not the last one."
Copyright Future Publishing (Overseas) Limited, a Future plc group company, 1995-2007. All rights reserved.
Cycling: Henderson wins last stage in Atlanta
9:48AM Monday April 28, 2008
New Zealand cyclist Greg Henderson signed off in style by winning the seventh and final stage of the Tour de Georgia in the United States today.
He used his renowned sprinting skills to good effect in the 101km circuit in downtown Atlanta to complete Team High Road's third stage win of the tour.
Henderson was among a 12-strong breakaway group which led the field by one minute for the better part of the race.
In a tough, uphill finale to the stage, Henderson muscled his way past Team CSC's Juan Jose Haedo, of Argentina, to take the stage, with Canadian Andrew Pinfold third.
Henderson's winning time was two hours 23 minutes 53 seconds.
Henderson performed prominently throughout the tour, winning the 174km third stage last week from Washington to Gainesville.
At that stage he also led the tour overall before tumbling to 93rd place on general classification during the fifth stage when he lost more than 15min after struggling for much of the stage in periodic rain.
His strong finish saw him improve to 74th overall, a little more than 27min behind the race winner, Kanstantin Sivtsov, of Belarus.
Another New Zealander, Jeremy Vennell, finished 29th overall, 5min 46sec behind Sivtsov.
Henderson was a clear winner in the sprint category, hauling in 53 points, while his nearest challenger, American Tyler Farrar, had 35.
- NZPA
Copyright (c)2008, APN Holdings NZ Limited
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