My name is Colton and I am a 10yr old bike racer. I started out
racing mountain bikes, then I started racing road bikes. I moved to
Frisco Texas in 2005 and learned to ride on the Superdrome track.
This is my 2nd year racing on the track with my team of 12 other
kids. The Superdrome has a youth development program with about 20
kids. We are coached by Suzie Goodwin. The Superdrome is a 250 meter
track with an about 44 degree angle it is one of the few Olympic
certified tracks in the U.S. It was built for the Olympic trials in
the 80’s it is a wooden track and to stay on you need to go 12 miles
per hour. Every month we have Friday evening races each category gets
2 or 3 races. We recently came back from Colorado Springs for junior
national track championships and I will tell you about that in the
next article.
Thanks to an email from Brendan Banovic, we have a new velodrome located in China. As always, you can download a Google Earth input file here.
In turn, that spurred me to review some Spanish and French locations where Google Earth’s images had been too coarse in the past. Some of those areas have improved resolution now, so more velodromes have been added. There are now 611 velodromes in 83 countries.
This velodrome looks great in Google Earth. It's apparently new or very well cared for, and recent upgrades to Google Earth's imagery don't hurt.
These countries have at least 10 velodromes in the database:
| Velodromes | Country |
|---|
| 82 | France |
| 55 | Japan |
| 45 | Italy |
| 42 | Australia |
| 38 | Germany |
| 35 | Spain |
| 30 | Argentina |
| 26 | United States of America |
| 21 | Great Britain |
| 14 | Mexico |
| 13 | People's Rep. of China |
| 12 | New Zealand |
| 11 | India |
| 10 | Belgium |
| 10 | South Africa |
| 10 | Canada |
| 10 | Venezuela |
As I said before, there are other sources for Nationals results this year, but I have also summarized them here. I did not include the team events for technical reasons.
Of course the timed events are also in the timed event database.
Just 9 days remaining before the start of the European Championships for Juniors and U23. The Dutch squad, along with me, is going to Cottbus comming Thursday.
I’m going to do the Sprint, Keirin and Team Sprint.
Click here for the official website.
Junior Velo will shut down as an active site on February 29, 2008. For those who are interested, I’ll try to answer two questions: 1) Why shut down? 2) Can that be changed?
Why Shut Down?
I no longer live near a track, and I am also much busier than I expected to be in my new location. I simply have not had the time to find enough good stories to keep the site interesting. Attempts to get other people to write more material have mostly failed. I even promised money to junior authors, but drew only one author.
Can That Be Changed?
I can see three ways this could go.
1) Adult and junior authors begin to write enough articles to keep the site interesting. That means at least one article per week, and ideally one per day. If we had several moderately active authors, this would not be hard. Becoming an author is easy - email me (velo at juniorvelo dot com) to get started.
2) Someone could completely take over the site, keeping the same purpose but with the new owner’s style and control. If you are interested, please email the same address.
3) I could just put up a banner warning people that the site is not maintained and leave it up for reference.
It was great fun getting this site started, meeting people because of it, and interacting with the visitors. I’d like to see it continue, but it needs to be more active to be worthwhile.
One last thing - why February 29th 2008? That’s the date I set for the end of the writing competition I attempted to get started. I need to keep the site running until then in order to make good on promises I made.
