Marriage on right track

Mountain bike couple live, train and strive as one

IF the couple that rides together stays together, then Dan and Rebecca McConnell are in it for the long haul.

The pair, who married last year, will fly the flag for Australia in the men’s and women’s mountain bike event today, where they hope to upgrade the bronze medals they won in Glasgow in 2014. They also competed at the London and Rio Olympics together but this is the first Games as husband and wife.

Rebecca (nee Henderson) finished fourth and Dan fifth at the Oceania championships in Dunedin in February before preparing for the Gold Coast Games, where the event will be held at Nerang.

“We spend all day, every day together,” Rebecca said.

“We train together and that can be up to five hours on the bike each day but it works well for us.”

Dan, 32, has won a silver and bronze at cross-country World Cups and is also a talented road cyclist who rode the 2015 Tour Down Under.

The course at the Nerang National Park is 4.5km long and requires a combination of technique, speed and skill.

Riders will compete an unspecified number of laps and whoever covers the greatest distance in the time will win.

Mountain bike made its Commonwealth Games debut in Manchester in 2002 and was on the program in Melbourne in 2006 and Glasgow in 2014.

Australia has never won a gold medal in men’s or women’s racing.

“It’s a pretty hard course, getting around it at a leisurely speed isn’t too bad but as soon as you start putting some fast laps together you realise it’s quite physically demanding. There’s a lot of pedalling, there’s not much room for recovery,” Dan said.

“It’s a track that’s fairly high-speed everywhere so you have to keep your concentration about you all the time.

“There aren’t many places where you can relax. Once you start doing it at race speed it’s a fairly technical track.”

Rebecca said she had high expectations. “We never go into a race aiming for second or third, you go there because you want to win, but it’s also about controlling the things you can control.”