Cycling: Kiwis don't waste time in hitting speed

The New Zealand men's team in action in Melbourne. Photo / Getty Images

It is a sport where giant leaps are measured in millimetres. Where thousandths of seconds matter. It's sprint cycling and, believe it or not, New Zealanders are suddenly good at it.

Ethan Mitchell, Sam Webster and Eddie Dawkins combined to win New Zealand's first sprint medal at a world championships at Hisense Arena last week, putting them in a league with the sport's European and Australian powerhouses.

They were aided and abetted by change-over infractions that disqualified Great Britain and Germany (lead riders can only pull off the track within a certain distance of the start-finish line) but, as Webster pointed out, that's part of the game.

Perhaps just as importantly, they went under the 44s barrier that separates the good from the very good.

"This is the first time we've gone under 44, that bloody insurmountable 43 that we've been longing for. We broke it twice [in a night] so for us, they're the perfect rides," said Dawkins, the Southland powerhouse whose job it is to draft behind Mitchell and Webster for two laps before bringing it home.

Their qualifying ride of 43.742s shattered their previous personal best of 44.002s and places them less than a second behind the world record of 42.914s set by Germany at Cali, Colombia, last year.

If fortune smiled on the team sprint, Simon van Velthooven's luck was all his own making as he belted out a kilo time trial in 1m 00.543s to claim bronze.

Dawkins, who is potentially in a battle with van Velthooven for third wheel in the team sprint, then broke the 10s barrier in the 200m time trial while qualifying for the knockout rounds of the sprint on Friday.

Mitchell and Matt Archibald also lowered their PBs in the 200m TT, begging the question: How did New Zealand, who have no tradition of sprint cycling and had no programme to speak of two years ago, get so fast, so fast?

"You have to look at the work sprint coach Justin Grace has done over the past few years, going back to when these boys were juniors," said Mark Elliott, high performance director at BikeNZ. Grace was a former sprint cyclist who missed qualifying for the Atlanta Olympics by three-thousandths of a second and later displayed his toughness by battling back from ulcerative colitis that made him so sick relatives gathered at his bedside to say their goodbyes.

Some of that resilience has rubbed off on his charges. So has the sting of failure.

"If you talk to Ethan and Sam, they just missed out on a junior world title at their first attempt and the day after that, they made a commitment to do everything they could every day of their lives to be the best they could be," Elliott said. "They came back the next year and won a junior world title and haven't stopped that philosophy since."

Take the personalities out of the sport and the other big factor that cannot be overlooked is funding.

BikeNZ's high performance hand-out from Sport NZ (formerly Sparc) is nearly equal to rowing's. Elliott, not a man easily given to hyperbole, recently labelled van Velthooven "the next [Sir] Chris Hoy" and Southlander Matt Archibald has also had good results at world cup meetings, so New Zealand has a core of riders that are now adding experience to potential.

"For them to get a medal at these champs, it's going to take them a big step along the way to a medal in London," Elliott said. "They're a special bunch of guys, the whole sprint crew. They're setting their own benchmarks and they're reaching every day to make them higher."

Internal pressure is helping, too. Curious international cycling rules dictate that you can only send an eight-man track team to London plus one rider who can cross from road to track. With the four-man pursuit team guaranteed selection, it means at least one fine sprinter is going to be watching from a distance.