Jerseyville cycles another champ
Jerseyville just might be the best cycling town, per capita, in the entire country.
Last year, the village sent national time trial champion Jordan Jones to the World Junior Track Championships as a member of the Canadian team.
And this year, 16-year-old Ainsley Black won the national track championship in team sprint last month, at the velodrome in Milton; while taking home silver medals in three other events.
“There are two of us now, and there are some others in the village riding,” says the Grade 11 Ancaster High School student, who represents the National Cycling Centre Hamilton.
“The (NCCH) team comes through there all the time, because we’re just so close. And I think that’s part of it.”
Another part is that the NCCH takes its introductory cycling programs into local elementary schools, hoping to interest preteens in the sport. Jones came to competitive cycling that way, so did Sydney Flageole Bray, who’s won at nationals, and Black herself caught the bug at a club demonstration when she was at Ancaster Senior Public.
“I didn’t even know bike riding was a sport until the National Cycling Centre of Hamilton came to my school, tested us and sent me home with a letter saying, ‘Come out and try this,’” she said.
From a horse-rearing family — she first saddled up at the age of three — Black didn’t even sit on a bicycle until she was nine years old. But seven years, and lots of victories, later, she has found her calling atop two wheels rather than four legs.
“I’m very committed to it, I definitely want to go far,” she says. “I’ve got my eye on the national (junior) team for next year. I’d like to go to Junior Road Worlds as well. And I definitely have my sights set on 2020 (Olympics) in Tokyo.”
As well as her four national medals on the track, Black won last year’s Youth Cup provincial road race final. And like so many riders in this area, likes both disciplines.
“They’re so different, it’s hard to compare the two,” she says.
“Track is a lot of sprinting, and short faster races, whereas road is long distance, and there’s lots of scenery and climbing.”
On the roads this spring and summer, she’ll compete in Ontario Cup races, the Paris to Ancaster Bicycle Race, and is hoping for a topfive finish at the road nationals.
NCCH head coach Rick Lee says that “the one thing Ainsley brings to the program is that tenacity.
Over the last three or four years, every time there’s been a major competition for her age division, she’s gone out and won it, despite being riddled with injuries and sicknesses.”
Over the past two and a half years she’s missed significant chunks of training time with two concussions incurred in crashes, a shifted pelvis that resulted from another crash, a shoulder problem and a strained hip flexor.
Plus, she has severe asthma, and carries an inhaler in her back pocket while racing.
A couple of years ago she was off the bike for six months with asthma flare-up problems, which were finally traced to construction dust in the velodrome working its way into her lungs.
Yet, the podium finishes have kept coming.
Lee says Black is a good finisher, describing her as “scrappy,” and says her rural roots may contribute to that.
“I have a thing about small country towns,” he says. “I think it brings out tough kids.”