April 11, 2011 (Argentina) – The 10-member team from Canada arrived in Mar del Plata Argentina to contest the Junior Pan Am Championships, after 36 hours of travel. The team went to the Velodrome to build their bikes and get 40 minutes of spinning on the quite fast concrete outdoor track.

Monday’s 2-hour track session was marred by a crash by one of the members of the team pursuit squad. A little road rash was cleaned up and training resumed. Team spirits are high and all the athletes are looking forward to the start of the competition. The Championships begin at 11am on Tuesday (April 12) morning with the men’s team sprint and women’s individual pursuit.
Here is the first of the daily athletes report…….

Kyle Buckosky – Surrey BC
After 36 hours of glorious traveling we arrived in Mar Del Plata Argentina. My first thoughts were that this city looks similar to my hometown of Surrey, BC except there are no stop signs and dogs roam free in the streets.  Then we arrived at the hotel which is awesome – the rooms are clean and fresh and the beds are very comfortable just like home.

Then we embarked on our first trip to the velodrome to build our bikes, we took a cab which was actually quite scary. The driving is a lot different than at home. Our cab driver spoke a little English and he said that the bigger faster cars always have the right away. There are very scary and hectic driving conditions here. The team arrived at the velodrome to find out that our bikes had not arrived from Buenos Aries. So we just walked around the track and checked it out. It looked pretty awesome. After another cab ride we went back to the hotel to have a team meal. It felt wonderful to sleep in a bed after trying to sleep on that airplane.

The next day we returned to the velodrome, built our bikes and had our first ride on the track. My first impression was that this track is very smooth and it was a little windy because it was outside. After a nice track ride to get out the jet lag we went back to the hotel for a nice lunch with a questionable cold scrambled egg desert, which nobody really liked.

After lunch we went back to the track for an afternoon session. During this session Jesse and I practiced some Madison exchanges and Emile, Alex and I did some team pursuit practice. This was a solid first day of race prep. This being my first project with the CCA I was quite excited and I am looking forward to doing many more CCA projects. It’s a lot of fun and I’m learning a lot. They’re bringing me closer to my lifelong dream of becoming a professional cyclist. Thanks to Rob, Howard, Sara, and everyone else at the CCA who made this trip possible.

Training session video to follow……