‘Perseverance is not a long race; it is many short races one after the other’  Walter Elliot

In my 7th UCI World Cup in Bilbao, Spain, I finally made it onto the Podium-twice! Bilbao has always been one of my favorite places to race due to the excellent organization by the Fundazioa Saiatu Foundacion, who have amazing volunteers doing transport, catering and race marshaling, therefore making an unsupported self-funded trip there easy for me. I also love the people of the Basque Country-open, amazingly friendly and always helpful.

I knew that despite my double Bronze medal success, my high world ranking, the absence of Russian athletes in Rio (which opened up further slots for para-cyclists, which were subsequently allocated to specific riders by the UCI) and the points I had earnt over the past two years competing (which were enough to gain a slot for one WH4) meant nothing. If Jess Varnish could not gain a slot to Rio, there was not much hope for me. It seems that glass ceilings still exist…

I was hopeful that the Rio Paralympics would have plenty of opportunities for my para-cycling hand cyclist friends, and would be televised. I was shocked to read results from just one combined road race medal event for FOUR very different categories, totaling 15 riders, whereas the six H5 women-there are only seven on the UCI world ranking list-competed in an entirely separate road race (all were ring-fenced slots). There were also only two time trial medal events, H1-3 with factoring, H4/5 with none, which was totally unfair to higher categories. There was no female Team Relay Team medal event either. I learnt from Sarah Storey, our UCI Athlete Representative, that two medal events had to be dropped to accommodate the Trike event splitting to separate male/females races, as there are only 50 medal events shared between Track cycling and Road cycling.

Unfortunately, hand cyclists cannot compete on the Track, so it is not possible to do the varied and numerous short medal events offered there. In my dreams, I’m doing a World Record attempt behind the Dernyman, sprinting the final 250m to a new Guinness World Record…but that’s the subject of another Blog post!