Two BVI cyclists crack Caribbean Road Bike top 20

BY DEAN GREENAWAY

Two BVI cyclists were among the top 20 finishers of 62 riders at the weekend Caribbean Road Bike Championships in Curacao.

Chris Ghiorse was eight overall and Andrew Young 20th in the championships, while Jaron Maduro the other BVI cyclists was involved in a crash and did not finish. “The BVI team did very well,” BVI Cycling Federation President David Thomas said on Monday on the team’s return. “That’s very good considering we were racing against 62 guys from 13 Caribbean countries, including Jamaica, Trinidad and Bermuda. We are really happy right now with our performance.”

Thomas said Ghiorse rode like a true champion. “All the experience he has from his road racing days came into play because, he was not as fit as some of the other guys in the race. But, because he knows how to race and how to think road racing, he was able to hang right in there with them. If it wasn’t for the lack of his fitness-and it was an uphill sprint finish-I think that he could have actually won the race if it wasn’t for that.”

With the local concentration on mountain biking, Thomas said a lot has been learnt from the Curacao event. “We have a really good team in the three guys that we took,” Thomas noted adding that they worked well together considering the short amount of time they had to prepare.
“We learnt that when up step into an International Cycling Union sanctioned race, you are playing with the big boys so to speak. Our program has been quite successful for the past 10 years. We are actually a lot better prepared than we think we are, yet we are still novices in that road racing is something new to us. All of the tactics and everything else that happened in that race we were new to. Chris however knew about all that and was able to play the game in the race.”