Hi everyone and welcome to another week,
It is a varied assortment of goodies for you today so we’ll get into it.
Sporting Moment
The Southland Times is running an online poll to find the best sporting moment of 2015 ahead of the ILT Southland Sports Awards next week. Click on this link https://is.gd/F2UwT7 to vote. We’ve voted for Eddie Dawkins’ rainbow jersey ride in the team sprint, but we’re a little biased. You can make up your own mind.
Junior Div meeting
A reminder that the AGM for the Junior Div will be held at 7pm in the Sarah Ulmer Lounge on Wednesday, June 15. That’s tomorrow if you’re reading it today.
Agenda items include a the 2016 accounts, a discussion around concession card funding, the Baxter and Neilson Series, Yunca tour, and the election of new officers. The Junior Div is in a strong position at the moment but it needs the ongoing support and commitment of parents to ensure that remains the case.
Working Bee
We will be holding a club working bee on Saturday from 1pm to 5pm. If you can pop down to assist – many hands make light work – that would be splendid. This is designed to improve storage, as per below.
Bike storage
The stadium has asked for all bikes in the tunnel to be removed. They’ve identified that as a risk in their health and safety plans.
To assist with this, work will be done under the track this weekend to potentially create more bike storage space, but in the future all the bike storage slots under the tunnel will be allocated and a small storage fee introduced. More to come on this.
Rider graduation process
We’re close to introducing a graduation system for young riders moving from Flyers to Wheelers and on to Club Racing. This is a result of the new H&S legislation and the identified risks with letting young inexperienced riders take part in racing. It’s not designed to stop them from getting on the track, but to make sure that when they come along to racing they have had the required training and we’ve kept track of that.
Once that process has been implemented, we will be looking at an accreditation process for adult riders to ensure safe adult riders are on the track.
Mark Hotton
General Manager
Wet weather rec rides
A reminder that there are wet weather rec rides most weekends from 10am to midday on Saturdays and Sundays throughout the winter months. This Sunday, however, due to a conference booking the open session will be 1-3pm instead. Just double check weekly on the track schedule, the link to this is just under the logo on the home page of the website.
Hayden NZ Team Selection
Finally, huge congrats to Hayden Strong who is the latest Cycling Southland member to be tapped on the should by Cycling New Zealand for their under 19 road team to ride the Tour L’Abitibi next month. Hamish Beadle is also riding this tour with his Novo Nordisk team.
This tour is seven stages over seven days riding 600kms, with a day set aside before the tour starts to present the teams and have a race they call the challenge sprint followed by a pre-race dinner. Looking at the tour documentation it is very well organised professional tour with a full schedule that includes meal times and menu's all of which is included with your team entry.
Have a look at this link to check out the tour information: http://tourabitibi.com/en/
Also a good on you to Eddie Dawkins who finished second behind team mate Sam Webster in Germany over the weekend Read more here and Natasha Hansen, who with team mate Olivia Podmore finished second in the team sprint in Cottbus behind the Olympic Champions Welte and Vogel and ahead of Colombia. Great work leading into their quests in Rio!