Josiah Ng Olympic Diary - SWE Sprint GP

I’m finally back to updating you on my racing again. This last friday we made a quick trip to Erfurt, Germany for our final race prior to going to the big one in Beijing. We left Valencia, Spain, our current training base on Wednesday morning right after our gym session. You would think a trip from Spain to Germany would be a relative short flight but the whole trip from hotel to hotel took 12 hours! The actual flight was just under 3 hours but there was a two hour drive to the airport in Spain, followed by a three and a half hour drive from the airport in Germany. Plus it didn’t help that the navigation system in the rented van was giving us some wrong directions! Technology can bit a pain sometimes!

We arrived in Erfurt totally exhausted. After a light supper I took a nice shower and fell in bed at just past midnight! Luckily we had one day to recover from the trip.

The track in Erfurt is an outdoor partially covered 250m concret track. Previously in its place was a 333m uncovered concrete track but with all the international events being on 250m I guess they saw it was time to replace it with this one.  It was a good looking thing but when we got on it we were surprised at how bumpy it was considering it was only 4 months new. I guess not every country has the super machines that can make silky smooth tracks like in Japan. No one can beat those guys for perfection and precision.

Well the bumpyness along with the cool weather made for some slow times in the morning 200m sprint qualifying times. I had some bad stomach problems the past few days and perhaps that had a part in me being a bit off what I expected.  I went 10.90 to qualify 19th out of 40 sprinters. The fastest time was Chris Hoy in a blazing 10.30. My teammate Azizul went really well to qualify 6th in a 10.56. My first round was a three up against Shane Kelly and Adam Ptachnik of the Czech Republic. I tried to control it and bring up the pace but on the back straight with a lap and a half, Kelly attacked hard and I was too late to close it. In my rep I had a four up and at that point I had such a bad stomach ache that I couldnt even finish my sprint.  I was hurting.

In the team sprint qualifying, I did everything I could to not let me teammates down and luckily we did alright and qualified 3rd, just missing out on 2nd by a few hundredths of a second to Australia.

Luckily for me, there was a 4 hour break and I could take a much need rest and hope that my stomach would get better. The afternoon session started off with the team sprint final against Greece for 3rd place. We did well by doing pretty much the exact same time to beat them handily.  Germany won against the Aussies.

My final race was the keirin. I wasn’t expecting too much due to the bad day I was having. So I surprised msyelf and probably my coach, John when I won my qualifying heat against two German teammates to make the final. In the final the Aussies and Germans were well represented by the duos of Shane Kelly/Ryan Bayley and Carsten Bergemann/Michael Seidenbecher. The Greeks had World Championships bronze medalist Christos Volikakis and Malaysia had me. I drew the first position but as the gun went off, Ryan (Ray as everyone likes to call him) wanted it so I gladly let him have it. I was in the ideal position of sitting in 2nd with Kelly on my wheel and Volikakis shadowing him. 

The two Germans were at the back.  As the motor pulled off they made an attempted attack which I covered with a right hand hook!  Take that!  hehe. I kept them off but felt another attack coming with 200m to go so I made my move and passed Ray. Coming out of turn four I felt someone on my right but I held it on the line to win by uh I dont know how much because I was so excited. All I know was that I won and I couldn’t believe it expecially after the horrible day I just had.  This is a much needed win for me.  More so for my head than anything else. I’ve had a tough last two years and getting this win over such a good field gives me back the confidence in myself.  Afterward a lot of people congratulated me. I got a bag of drinks and a bouquet of flowers which I threw to the crowd as did my victory lap complete with people clapping and victory music playing over the loud speakers.  It was an awesome feeling!

Unfortunately, we didn’t have much time and had to pack up straight away to make our 5am flight!  It was 10pm and we had to leave the hotel by 11pm for the 3 hour drive back to the airport.  We arrived back to our hotel in Valencia at 10am.  We were totally exhausted as you can imagine and slept practically the whole day!

I hope this is the start of all the good things to come in the next month. I’ll try my best to stay motivated to blog more about my month leading up to Beijing. Wish me all the best!