Another noticeable absence is England’s Shanaze Reade. With only two events left to qualify, she is leaving herself only two chances of qualifying for the Olympics. According to her new coach, Grant White, “Shanaze is missing the Adelaide Supercross event due to the travel involved to such an event. This would impact on her current training phase.”
Reade has had a busy schedule over the last couple of months. She won a gold medal as part of the women’s team in the time trial at the UCI Track World Championships in Manchester last month.
Another late exclusion came from the reigning BMX World Champion, Kyle Bennett, from Texas. Last weekend Bennett took out the USA National Championships and has decided to rest, but the 28 year old is confident of gaining an Olympic berth with a 42 points lead over any other USA rider on their national ranking scale.
According to Mike King, the USA Olympic BMX Coach, “Kyle decided to tone down his travel commitments and if you do the math he still could be in the lead even without racing this weekend.”
Donny Robinson and Mike Day will fly the flag for the strong men’s USA team, with the pair currently ranked third and sixth in the world respectively. The USA men’s team currently dominate the nations ranking with a massive 590 points. Their nearest rival is the Netherlands with 410 points closely followed by the Australians with 407 points. For the Australian team the event on home soil means that for the first time they have no travel or time zone difficulties. Other all other teams having the challenge of travelling from their winter and for some teams an uncommon 24 hour flight to recover from. All this and a rowdy crowd should add up to a nice home town advantage for the Aussies.
While the Australian men’s team looking strong with their current position it will be interesting to see if the absence of the top French team will give the Australian women’s team an advantage and a chance to move up the rankings. But with some of the lower teams scrambling to get in the top four they will have heir work cut out for them.
According to BMX National Assistant Coach, Wade Bootes, the absence of the French women could have some repercussions for the Australian women’s points. With the top French team usually claiming top points there will be more points on available. If some of the lower ranked countries make the final it could affect the Australian women’s ranking current ranking.
“Without the French team now, the Australian girls will have to finish higher than the American girls on the weekend to help keep their chance alive for a possible two spots for the Olympics,” explained Bootes. Australia’s women are currently ranked second but the European countries still have two rounds of their Continental series after the Supercross event in Adelaide so they still can earn points,” Bootes said.
Australia has the largest contingent of women riders entered, a total of eight and Bootes expects to get several of them into the final.
Practice on the newly built track will get underway on Friday mid-day with racing starting on Saturday at 12.30 pm with the time trail qualification runs. The top 64 men and the top 32 women will proceed into the action packed final on Sunday.
Action should be fast and furious, so if you are in the area, get down a cheer on the Aussies.
After doing a BMX 'zine for ten years (1987 - 1996) FATBMX made it on the internet. The year was 1998. Here to stay.