Paralympics: 'Hillbilly' wins first NZ medal

By GREG ANSLEY

SYDNEY - New Zealand cyclist Mark Inglis raced from almost total obscurity to a silver medal at the Paralympic Games yesterday, riding in an Olympic velodrome and the kilometre time trial for the first time.

Inglis had only days to overcome his terror of the track to leap from horrified bottom-crawler to world-beating time trialist.

"I was scared as the proverbial," he said. "It took me probably 10 laps on the flat [on his first training run] before I even moved up on the boards and when I did I'm sure I've been on mountains that aren't as steep as that."

The trial was to have been a warm-up for Inglis and team-mate Paul Jesson, and a chance to judge the competition for their major races later in the Games.

Instead, the man that team manager Wayne Thorpe had initially dismissed as a "hillbilly," left the world's best in his dust, taking the lead as 10th rider off the start and holding it until the final rider, world record-holder Radovan Kaufman, of Slovakia, eclipsed the Paralympic record.

In the stands cheering on the Blenheim winemaker, who lost both his legs to frostbite in a 14-day ordeal on Mt Cook, were his parents, Mary and Jim Inglis.

Jesson, who set a 4000m pursuit world record at the 1998 world disabled riding championships, finished ninth.

Inglis' medal, presented by International Olympic Organisation president Juan Antonio Samaranch, was the second awarded at the Games behind Kaufman's gold, and launched what is expected to be one of New Zealand's strongest Paralympics campaigns.

"It's pretty awesome," Inglis said. "But that's what I came here to do."

When Inglis began his ride, Jesson was in third place with a time of 1m 25.811s, behind Spain's Jose Andres Blanco and Australian Greg Ball.

Ahead of him was a powerful European field, including Kaufman and Switzerland's Beat Schwarzenbach, a rapidly emerging rider who set an unofficial world record in the 3000m pursuit in May.

"I was absolutely dying on the last lap," Inglis said. "If only I could have kept my speed up. But I honestly didn't think I would keep it on the track."

Inglis finished in 1m 23.169s, behind Kaufman's new Paralympic record of 1m 21.393s.

Thorpe, who celebrated Inglis' silver and his 58th birthday yesterday, said the medal was not unexpected, despite his early doubts about the rider.

"I had a feeling the way he was training he could go places," he said.

Inglis had come out of nowhere, emerging from Blenheim never having ridden a banked track such as Sydney's Dunc Gray Velodrome.

"The first time I saw him on the track I thought, 'jeez, what have we got here? This is a hillbilly."'

But Thorpe said that within days Inglis had shown his potential.

Inglis now faces the road race, in which Jesson will also ride, next Thursday.

The other New Zealander in action yesterday was shooter Colin Willis, who competed in the men's 10m standing air rifle competition. The Christchurch paraplegic was eighth, after scraping into the top-eight afternoon finals session in seventh place.

He recorded 582 points in the morning and was close to the rest of the field. But he slipped a little in the finals session, dropping to eighth with a combined total of 681.4 points.

His best chance of a medal is in the 10m prone competition today.

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