Whitten's huge weekend started on Saturday in the Omnium, the event that I reported on last year when she won a silver medal at the 2009 Worlds. The omnium is a fairly new event in track cycling, and I expected that her success from last year would be tough to replicate this year. The omnium is comprised of 5 events: a 200m flying start, a scratch race, a 2k individual pursuit, a points race, and a 500m time trial. I had to look up what a scratch race is - it's a 5k race where you just do as many laps as you can against the rest of the field. At least I think that's what it is. Maybe track cycling could make their events simpler to understand...anyhow, Whitten finished 2nd, 9th, 3rd, 6th, and 3rd in the five events to win the overall gold medal in a very busy day.
She recovered well overnight as on Sunday, she won the points race (a race where riders go around a bunch of times and get points every few laps for their position in the field - again, these events are fairly difficult to understand without watching them) to become the only individual double gold medalist during the World Championships. Her two gold medals also pushed Canada into 5th overall in the final medal table - and we won as many gold medals as the USA did. A very impressive weekend for sure!
A little background on Tara Whitten - she took up cycling in 2008 (hmmm, she's had a pretty good first two years in the sport) after giving up cross country skiing. Unlike many of the men's track stars who are road racers as well as track racers, it appears Whitten doesn't participate in road racing. She shares a lot of background with Lori-Ann Muenzer - she's from Edmonton, she's only a track racer, but unlike Muenzer (an Olympic champion who won 4 medals but no golds at Worlds), Whitten gets to wear the rainbow jersey for the next year! She's obviously Canada's greatest cycling champion right now, and hopefully she can get a track cycling a little more publicity in the upcoming months and years. Congrats Tara.
1 comment:
Thank you for the great report on Tara Whitten's success at Worlds! CBC will be broadcasting the event on April 10th at 3:30 pm EST, so you can see her win and see what all the races are - though your report was accurate, the Scratch Race is first one across the line wins and in the points race the riders get points every 10 laps, the one with the most points at the end wins.
Tara has not only had success on the track, but on the road as well. She is the current National Time Trial Champions and competed for Canada at Road Worlds last year - so she really is an all around amazing rider!
Keep up the great work and see you on the road!
Petrina
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