Evan Oliphant (Scotland)

 

15th of March, 2006; by Larry Hickmott

Home Nations for Commonwealth Games

 

A rider who has had a lot of success in Britain is Scotland's Evan Oliphant but a medal at the Games would definitely be a move up to the big stage in World Cycling. Talking to him at the Melbourne track on Tuesday, he says "the preparation has been going well doing a lot of races on road and track. Everything has gone well and as planed which is pretty good".

At the Games, Evan will be riding the Points and Scratch races as well as the road race. Unlike his team-mate James McCallum, Evan has managed to steer clear of any illness and Evan adds that he arrived in Australia with better form that he thought he would have mainly due to the training he did for the Manchester World Track Cup event.

 

"It wasn't until I got here that I started to feel good though and I have more or less felt good since then." Asked if it has been difficult to not peak too early with the amount of races he has on offer here and the ideal training conditions, he replied "it was at first, because when we arrived we had a week here and then we were racing. Because the sun was out, it was tempting to go out and do a lot of stuff but because we're here for a while, we managed to hold back a bit."

Evan then explained that until Melbourne, the endurance riders haven't really seen much of their Scottish team mates due to the different schedules they have all had. Evan and James for example did the Madison in Bendigo recently where they were 5th, which means that the final training days at the track were more recovery efforts.

"We were trying to keep out of trouble there and have a bit of blast, our last big effort before coming here. So we spent yesterday recovering and today we're just doing some spinning efforts behind the motorbike."

Good luck to Evan at the Games where I am sure he'll have plenty of people watching out for his results back home in Scotland.