The Australian 2010 MTBO Team:

Men: Steven Cusworth, Grant LebbinkAdrian Jackson, Alex Randall

Women: Mary Fien, Melanie Simpson

And Australia´s first ever junior MTBO team (only junior men for 2010): Chris Firman, Marc Gluskie, Luke Polland

Officials: Kay Haasma (coach),Brihony Lebbink (team assistance)

2010 Archives
Junior men finish 5th in the relay Monday, 19 July 2010
Long Final Saturday, 17 July 2010
JWOC Middle Final and WOC Long Qualification Thursday, 15 July 2010
Middle Distance Photos Thursday, 15 July 2010
Middle distance final Wednesday, 14 July 2010
Photos and maps from the sprint Tuesday, 13 July 2010 Some photos of the sprint and copies of the maps can be found via the official website...
Sprint Gold from AJ Monday, 12 July 2010
World Champion, again! Monday, 12 July 2010
WOC starts tomorrow! Sunday, 11 July 2010
Anecdotes from the team Thursday, 8 July 2010
More about the races... Wednesday, 7 July 2010 A summary of how the Aussie team did and what they thought aboud the races.
And training continues... Wednesday, 7 July 2010 More about the Aussie team training camp in stinking hot Portugal.
Training camp begins Monday, 5 July 2010 Now all the Australian team has safely arrived and got their first taste of Portuguese terrain.
Less that a fortnight to go!! Monday, 28 June 2010 With less than a fortnight to go, the Australian team has begun arriving in Europe and will be meeting up next weekend for some warm up races in Portugal.
Long and Middle distance races: Gdansk Wednesday, 9 June 2010 Melanie´s wrap up of World cup round two held in Gdansk, Poland.
Round two of the World MTBO Cup: Gdansk, Poland Friday, 4 June 2010 The second round of the 2010 MTBO world cup begins tomorrow in the forests around Gdansk, Poland.
Melanie Simpson Saturday, 29 May 2010
World ranking events in Denmark Tuesday, 25 May 2010 Melanie´s experiences at the recent WREs in Denmark.
Welcome to the blog of the 2010 Australian MTBO team Monday, 17 May 2010

Sprint Gold from AJ

Monday, 12 July 2010

My last urban MTBO WOC sprint was in Poland 2 years ago, where although I finished 6th it was a race where I never felt comfortable with the map and was quite disappointed with afterwards.  So despite having surprised everyone, not the least myself by winning the sprint (my least favourite discipline) last year in Israel, I was once again nervous with the prospect of the very urban terrain facing us in Chaves.  This was compounded by the fact that the town was going to be relatively open, with public and spectators wandering and driving through, so an element of luck was going to be involved to avoid having an accident!  In the end there were no real problems, with dozens of marshals all around the city controlling traffic as much as possible and warning if 2 riders were about to arrive at the same corner at the same time!

I started in the Red start group (last 10 competitors) by virtue of being the reigning champ, despite not currently being in the top 10 ranked riders.  After waiting around for a couple of hours in the arena and warming up on the very dusty running track (we all got much dirtier from the warm up than the race itself!) it was time to hit the streets of Chaves.  Straight away on the first control the 1:7500 scale got the better of me and I went straight past the gap in the buildings I needed to take, and despite not going too far past it was enough to lose 20 odd seconds.  Another couple of hesitant controls later I saw Lasse Brun Pederssen who had started 1 min behind me on an in-and-out control, and he was probably now only within 30 sec.  This spurred me on, and for the rest of the course I had no more wobbles, and maybe only lost a handful of seconds in route choice.  Once I had the flow going I finally felt able to hit full speed now and then and my super fast Schwalbe Furious Freds definitely were definitely not slowing me down!

After crossing the line I had the fastest time, but given my early mistake I was sure that Lasse or one of the other fast four riders who had started behind me would appear any second.  After a few minutes had gone by and all the other riders had crossed the line it was finally time to celebrate my second sprint gold in a row.  There are no corny medal-in-teeth pictures yet as the prize giving is tonight, but below you can see a couple of pics of the pretty bouquet I received at the flower ceremony!