The final countdown

Competition begins on Friday, so only two more sleeps before we get down to the serious stuff. Touch wood, everyone in the team is feeling good, due in no small part to all the hard work being done by Peter, our physio or more broadly, our soigneur - that means the person who is all things to all people in a cycling team. A very Euro term and very appropriate, given our current location!

Some members of the team ventured onto the velodrome again today for another frantic shared session. It really is quite hair raising when you have three or four different countries with little common language and riders with varying levels of stability all racing around the track focussed solely on their own program. Kerry discovered track skills she didn't want to know she had yesterday, steering the tandem around people from other countries who showed little regard for anyone else's safety! Fortunately everyone survived the session in one piece.

Here's Tom putting his life on the line to inspect Alex's pedal mid session. Or maybe he was just paying homage?

And so, on to introducing some more members of the team.

Sue Powell (L) and Alex Green (R), are our two C4 women. 

This is Alex's first visit to Worlds and she's another convert from rowing (we have three in the team that I'm aware of). She maintains that her entire purpose in rowing, cycling or any form of exercise is so that she can justify eating more, but I think she might actually like the competition just a little bit.

Sue comes from an elite hockey background. When a back injury prevented her from continuing in that sport, cycling was lucky to pick her up, as her results to date show - one world championship, a couple of world records and a swag of other medals make her one of the most credentialled athletes in the team.

Jayme Paris (centre below) is still one of the youngest in the team but has been competing long enough to have quite a lengthy list of achievements to her credit in the C1 division. Along with cycling, she loves her dogs, lizards and Welsh fiance, not necessarily in that order!

I've noted the divisions that people compete in. If you're not familiar with the classifications I'd suggest a visit to the UCI website for more information however in a nutshell the classifications go from C5 - least disabled, down to C1, then the B divisions which are the vision impaired athletes who compete on the tandems. There are other divisions, but not on the track so we won't go into them here.

Tune in for the next blog to meet the remainder of the team and I might even manage a preview of our prospects at these Championships if I can get the coaching brains trust together to give me some bold predictions.