NZ track cyclists heading to Amish country for Games prep

Pennsylvania’s Amish community will have a new neighbour rolling into town from next week.

The New Zealand track cycling sprint team are relocating to Trexlertown on the east coast of the United States.

That’s where they will ramp up their training in preparation for the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow, which is now less than nine weeks away.

Having completed a strength-based phase of training at the Avantidrome in Cambridge, the focus will be more on speed in Pennsylvania.

The team will get top class racing against other national teams every Friday night at the Trexlertown velodrome, with the Netherlands and Trinidad among the teams also training there.

Meanwhile, they’ll be sharing the roads with clydesdales and wooden carts, rather than big rigs and Chevrolets.

‘‘We’re lucky enough we’ll be based out of Pennsylvania, in a place called Trexlertown, not far out of a city called Allentown,’’ New Zealand sprint coach Anthony Peden said.

‘‘It’s predominantly Pennsylvania Dutch, beautiful roads to train on, lots of cornfields and things like that, but we’re lucky enough to have regular racing every Friday evening, world class racing.

‘‘The Dutch national team will be there, the Canadian national team will be there, Trinidad and Tobago will be there, so we’re probably going to have 25 or 30 good sprinters . . . over four Friday nights of racing, and we don’t have to travel.’’

He said it will be similar to their current setup in New Zealand, with the team based at a centralised hub, not having to travel to train and race.

Racing will be fierce, and will be the perfect way to prepare the team for the Commonwealth Games.

Since the Elite and Under19 track cycling championships ended in February, the sprint team took a short break and then kicked into conditioning training.

The team have been put through their paces over the past two months in the gym and on the track, working on increasing their power and strength.

World champion sprint team starter Ethan Mitchell said the focus has been on lifting big weights, and doing it as fast as possible.

That’s to aid the explosiveness out of the start, which is vital in the team sprint where a thousandth of a second can mean success or failure.

Last week, BikeNZ’s strongest sprinter Matt Archibald was pushing a massive 640 kilograms on the leg press, and Mitchell said it’s pretty standard territory for the sprint team.