Junior Track Cycling

It’s not every year that we have such a strong crop of juniors graduating into the senior ranks. Yesterday the “U.S. National Track Cycling Talent Pool” was announced (pdf description here). In the sprint squad we have Michael Blatchford, and the sprint development squad includes Aaron Kacala and Ryan Nelman.

This was a particularly strong year for the guys. Of 10 male members in the pool, one is a junior. There is also a set of development squads, where 2 of 7 male riders are “graduating” juniors. The ratios don’t sound high, until you realize that the main group is open to all the top riders in the country, and the development squads are open to riders up to age 22.

I predict that over the next few years we will see a surge of strong “graduating” junior women, as riders such as Kim Geist (17), Kim LaFleur (16), Cindy Lakatosh (16), Catherine Fiedler (15), and Colleen Hayduk (14) work their way up.

Here it is, the feature I have been losing sleep over. Now you can click on a map and get an aerial view of any velodrome in the USA. You can even link to a MapQuest street map.

To see it go to the Velodrome Locator

A few velodromes can be seen well enough to make out the stayers line or at least the start/finish. The rest will at least be identifiable to those who ride them. It all depends on the quality of images available for that velodrome’s location. The best images are normally in or near urban areas, and provide about 1/4 meter resolution.

Have fun, but understand that my server isn’t on a very fast connection. If downloading seems slow you may be sharing the bandwidth with too many other users - consider trying again later. Also, please let me know if you find any bugs or incorrect locations. Just leave a comment.

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