NEWS FOR NOVEMBER 2003

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Jo Tindley and Rachel Ball Race at Gent 6

Report from Bryan Taylor: Following on from our successful trip to the Noel Fore Memorial meeting at Gent, I received an invite for two girls to ride in a junior girls' derny race during the Saturday night session of the Gent 6. The race was in honour of Leontien Van Moorsel and it was Van Moorsel herself who fired the gun to started the race.

The two riders I asked were Jo Tindley, who had raced the previous week at Gent, and Rachel Ball, who we took to Gent last year to ride the Noel Fore meeting. Both had experience of the track and also some experience of riding behind a derny, with Jo getting some invaluable training time during the derny accreditation session at Newport the previous weekend (pictured below).

I don't think we were really prepared for the attention we seemed to get from the crowd though. Maybe because the pro's spend most of their time in their cabins, the girls were more accessible as they warmed up in the track centre or the tunnel area below. It was quite a bizarre spectacle to have a crowd just watching them warm up on rollers, but thankfully neither managed to fall off despite the attention.

The race itself was fast. We were expecting the first half to be fairly steady, but someone seemed to have forgotten to tell the pacers, as it didn't look that way at all with big gaps opening up pretty quickly. Rachel and Jo both struggled to hold the derny's at times, but they stuck at it with gutsy rides to finish 3rd and 4th respectively. Even after it finished, just hanging around in the riders area with people like Eddy Merckx & Jean Marie Leblanc was a pretty cool experience.

From a coaching perspective, the fact the girls handled the potential pressure of racing in a goldfish bowl with a few thousand spectators watching their every move really well, and loved every minute of it, enjoying the attention rather than panicking at such a young age, must bode well for the future.

Afterwards, Jo said "it was a great evening and a really good atmosphere with all the people and but at the same time one of the hardest races..." whilst Rachel was equally pleased, saying "it was fun to do. I really enjoyed racing in front of all those people and there was a great atmosphere. The race was very hard work and the only down side was that all the smoke was choking me when I was racing!"

Results

 1 Maxime Groenewegen (Ned) (Zijlaard)
 2 Karen Verbeek (Bel) (Vaarten)
 3 Rachel Ball (Gbr) (Walrave)
 4 Jo Tindley (Gbr) (Durst)
 5 Laurence Melys (Bel) (Van Uytvange)
 6 Fauve De Floor (Bel) (Persijn)

Finally, a thank you from me to Ian Smith & Alex Wharton for all their help with the trip.