NEW Zealand riders Jack Carswell and Lewis Bower finished 23rd and 25th respectively in an 80-strong field in the junior men’s time trial at the world road cycling championships in Belgium yesterday.
Carswell (Cambridge) finished 23rd in 27min 13.23sec and Bower (Auckland) 25th in 27min 16.65sec over the 22.3km test from the North Sea resort of Knokke-Heist to Bruges.
Both averaged 49kmh-plus to be the leading riders outside Europe and North America.
The young riders, without the benefit of recent competition in this discipline under the Covid environment, raced their first time trial since the New Zealand championships in
February.
‘‘It’s the best I could have ridden on the day. I paced it well and the legs felt pretty good,’’ Carswell said.
‘‘It was so absolutely dead flat, something like 44m of gradient over the whole race.
‘‘I was trying to rein it back in a bit over the first half but got a bit too excited and opened up the arms a little bit.
‘‘I ended up doing about the same for both splits so I was happy with that.’’
Bower liked the course.
‘‘It was fast and a cool course, although rolling would have suited me better,’’ he said.
‘‘I came over halfway through August and managed to do a couple of local races which was not the best build-up for a time trial, but we both did good efforts today.’’
The Kiwis are buoyant about the road race tomorrow (NZ time) when they will be joined by South Canterbury’s Mitchel Fitzsimons.
‘‘From the looks of it, the road course suits our riding style,’’ Bower said.
‘‘All three of us like rolling terrain and not too hilly so it should be good.’’
Carswell rated their chances in the 121km race which comprises eight laps around Leuven near Brussels, with 990m of elevation per lap.
The three New Zealand juniors were all looking forward to it.
‘‘We all want to make it a good hard race and we definitely have the fire power either to have someone in the break or a man up in the sprints, so the race could go either way and we should be up there,’’ Carswell said.
