While the world champs were on a couple of weeks ago, Jeremy Christmas was at the managers meeting for New Zealand and it was announced that there was to be a UCI cat 1 race to be held in Guigang, China all expenses paid for invited international riders. There was a race held here last year and China really want a world cup to be held there, to do so they need international riders form lots of nations to race the event.
So after a lot of panicked emails and phone calls to make the deadlines, Katie and myself put our names forward and waited for other New Zealand riders to confirm, in the end we have 4 of us, Sam Thompson coming as our manager, Sam Shaw, Katie and Myself. There was going to be 3 NZXC riders going but unfortunately Norway wouldn't process Kate Fluker's visa so she can no longer come.
We got visa confirmed at the end of last week and finally got tickets yesterday and we leave today (Wednesday) exciting times. We have had 2 and half weeks of intense training, after 2 months of very limited riding we are feeling the strain but will give everything we have. There is a huge 94 International riders going 74 males and 20 females and only 50 Chinese riders, we are not sure on the genders of the Chinese riders yet, but it will be a massive cat 1 field with top pro riders (Julie Bresset in the chicks current Olympic and World Champion) and 30 different nations.
Facebook, Twitter are band in China so check website for updates, and hopefully we can get a few updates off.
Cheers
Carl and Katie
