Cycling: Must Tri harder to eke out the dollars

You, your bike and your woolly blanket are bundled into a large white van, having just pedalled 130km of a recent Tour de France's defining Queen stage. You've slogged it out in sleet and thunderstorms.

Were it not for the five hot chocolates that barely touched the sides at a local café in the Pyrenees, you'd be entering the early stages of hypothermia. You feel great.

That's just one day in the life over the past few years if you've been part of Triathlon New Zealand or BikeNZ's elite programmes. But it is all about to change.

Plans are afoot to scale back overseas bases in the south of France. These have been reinforced with the latest round of London 2012-targeted Sparc funding.

Both sports had increases, with BikeNZ's coffers boosted by 48 per cent over four years to $12 million and Triathlon New Zealand by 23 per cent to $4.8m. However the weakening dollar means investment may not stretch as far.

BikeNZ will instead move its male operations from Limoux in the French countryside, where it has been since 2005, to the level terrain of Belgium, near Ghent, an area conducive to the new emphasis on track riding. A quality velodrome is also on hand.

It's a system tested when they stuck the Olympic track team into a 10-week block in Belgium pre-Beijing.

It also dovetails with Olympic pursuit bronze medallists Sam Bewley and Jesse Sergeant getting feeder contracts into Lance Armstrong's under-23 team and teammates Marc Ryan and Westley Gough looking for more European pro-riding opportunities.

High-performance manager Mark Elliott says the move has also brought a change in strategy on how many athletes they target, with numbers likely to be restricted to a maximum of eight.

"In the past we learned a lot of athletes weren't ready for the step up in intensity of racing in Europe. Now we'll monitor athletes in shorter six- to eight-week blocks, bring them home then send them over again, rather than a five-month sustained programme where most athletes are toast by the end. We want long-term development over four years."

New Zealand's top women track cyclists, led by pursuiter Alison Shanks and backed by new team pursuit World Cup champions Kaytee Boyd and Lauren Ellis, will spend much of their time in the United States.

Elliott says they want to work in altitude at Boulder, Colorado, or further afield in New Mexico or Arizona. He says that would mirror what he had Bevan Docherty doing before his second Olympic medal last year. Docherty would get oxygen supplementation on a treadmill, then go back out into altitude training.

The number of women going will be decided after the nationals this week as the 'Power to the Podium' programme is further fuelled.

After falling short of their Sparc funding aspirations, Triathlon New Zealand CEO Dave Beeche says they're of a similar mindset.

"We'll be bringing together targeted athletes for 2012 in Colorado for six weeks before taking them for a similar period to northern Europe, rather than have one house for six months.

"Even if we'd been successful getting all the funding we wanted we'd still look to tighten up the programme. With a new sport that's evolving you take an inclusive approach to start but now we'll be opting for less athletes."

Mark Watson was the manager of the base outside the village of Bellegarde du Razes near Limoux for three years from 2006. He agrees with Beeche, having become more hard-nosed about what was required, the longer he spent in the role.

"Kiwis don't have access to the vastness of geography and the variety of events Europe offers. We need to exploit those resources. Athletes should be funded but on the proviso the national coach [Greg Fraine] has greater control, telling them what races they'll do. The pool should be large at the start but culled quickly, based on performance."

So while it's an end to being nestled among the vineyards and popping out for café au lait and brioche it promises to be a step forward to bringing on the next generation of Ulmers, Carters, Dochertys and Roulstons.