Manawatu¯ cycling enters yet another sparkling era
Stewart and Stannard setting the standard.
Just check out Campbell Stewart’s two silver medals at the Commonwealth Games and Robert Stannard’s elevation to one of the world’s leading road teams.
Stewart might be only 19, but his silvers against big fields in the Games’ scratch and points races should have come as no surprise because he is a four-times world junior champion and was fifth in the omnium at the recent world championships in the Netherlands.
Stannard is also 19 and has been going well in road racing in Europe. He is with the development team of Mitcheltonscott, the old Orica Greenedge team from Australia, and last week won a road race in Italy and was third in the under-23 Tour of Flanders in Belgium.
It will be huge if he gets on the World Tour next year.
Mike Mcredmond has coached Stewart and a multitude of other riders, often making do with the asphalt track at Feilding now the old Memorial Park track is long dead and buried.
With the big track events finished until later in the year, Stewart has joined Team Wiggins in England on a one-year contract and will be off there next month to ride one-day road races in Europe to develop his engine even further. The team was founded by Tour de France winner Bradley Wiggins in 2015 to develop under-23 riders.
It’s a similar route taken by Manawatu¯ ’s Jesse Sergent, who went to Trek Livestrong in the United States and on to ride the big tours and classics. We caught sight of Sergent trackside on the Gold Coast.
He was called in by Cycling NZ to help out coaching the Kiwi riders at the Games. He has also joined Hayden Roulston’s coaching business and still sells real estate for Manawatu¯ cycling legend Max Vertongen.
After his cycling career, Vertongen coached Mcredmond and world kilo champion Anthony Cuff in another grand era before Nathan Dahlberg became a hardnosed Tour de France professional. Lee Vertongen rose to cycling’s heights and then along came track rider Simon van Velthooven and Sergent.
The Games track cycling at Brisbane made for a fascinating TV spectacle.
But when New Zealand’s pursuit team was disqualified, either a mechanic or a rider messed up and not naming anyone meant all were tarnished.
One former rider told me he did his own measurements and if he could get it right as a 16-year-old, then they should be able to at the elite level.
Camilla was right
The boring Commonwealth Games opening ceremony sent the most sporting viewers to bed early on a Wednesday night in television history.
Buckingham Palace was forced to issue a statement that Camilla loved the ceremony when anyone who hadn’t sloped off to bed could see she was bored out of her mane.
Camilla might be more dowager than duchess, but I was in her camp. For a start, she had to sit beside the stuffed shirt that is Charles ‘‘whatever-in-love-means’’ Windsor.
Then came the ad-interrupted parade of nations that seemed more like the closing ceremony, where anything goes.
Players in many teams were carried shoulder high and I have seen better marching from a flock of Perendales up the Turakina Valley. They should have had army sergeant-majors with flailing batons there to keep them in line and a machine to trash cellphones to have avoided the spectacle of so many athletes taking selfies.
Try that at the Masters golf and you’d be frog-marched out beneath the magnolias.
The infernal intrusions of TVNZ’S adverts have restored Sky back in the good books. As many have said, the Games got in the way of the advertising.
Once we used stamp collecting to bone up on our world geography. Since philately has waned, we have relied on the Games parades of nations, but when TVNZ kept cutting away to commercials, we didn’t get to see half of them.
I was hanging out to see the Turks and Caicos Islands team from the Caribbean who, by the way, compete for Great Britain at the Olympics. Yes, London still has its colonies. They just call them overseas territories now.
And if the Isle of Man can compete, then so should the Chatham Islands. I spotted a weird boxer from Cameroon who did a jig between flurries.
Cameroon is about as British as the French Foreign Legion. Apparently, the former French territory simply asked to join the Games Federation and was accepted six Games back. More the merrier, I suppose. Part of Cameroon was British-ruled after the Germans were booted out after World War I, so there is a slender link.
Others at the Gold Coast from outside the old boys’ empire are Namibia (Germany, South Africa), Rwanda (Germany, Belgium) and Mozambique (Portugal).
The Commonwealth represents a third of the world’s population and the Americans should consider applying because they were ruled by the British chaps until 1776.
PS: Don’t mention the netball.