Stefan Ritter

WITH a couple of junior world records under his belt, Edmonton’s Stefan Ritter is steadily putting in the hard work to make his mark as an elite. He had a standout year in 2016, which saw him take the country’s first-ever junior world title with his kilo win and a bronze in the sprint at junior track worlds. The Pan Am championships is where he got the junior kilometre time trial world record and the junior flying 200 metre world record. These results put him on the radar to win the Alberta junior male athlete of 2016.

With that momentum, Ritter started out strong in 2017. He says he had really good form and racing was going really well. But a couple of hard crashes resulting in a minor brain bleed, concussion and broken collarbone set him back for about three months, not only physically, but mentally, too, because he didn’t know how long it would take him to get back to where he was. “I got back to good form sooner than I expected. That really showed in Minsk,” he says of his performance a the World Cup in the Belarusian capital this past January. “I was really happy with my keirin second place and the flying 200 qualification time trial for sprint rounds.” A few more second-place finishes in December (second in the sprint and kilo in Portugal, and in the keirin in Switzerland) solidified a strong start to the season for the 19 year old who is currently training with Cycling Canada.

Ritter lives about five minutes from the Milton velodrome, which is very convenient for training. In January, he was selected for April’s Commonwealth Games in Australia. His sights are firmly set on the 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo. At the moment, university plans are on the back burner, but further studies are something he’d like to do eventually. “I can always go back to school after a certain amount of years, but I can’t come back to this.”