March 04, 2018 (Apeldoorn, NED) – Jasmin Duehring (Vancouver, BC) claimed bronze for Canada landing third on the podium in the women’s Points Race on the final day of the 2018 UCI Track World Championships in Apeldoorn, Netherlands. Kirsten Wild  (Ned) won gold while Jennifer Valente (USA) took the silver.

Duehring, who was seventh in the Scratch Race on the opening day of the Championships, came back from a disappointing Madison on Saturday to finish third behind Kirsten Wild of the Netherlands and Jennifer Valente of the United States. Duehring was one of nine riders to lap the field, as well as scoring points in three intermediate points during the race, to finish with 30 points in total.

“We’ve had a strong team here, but it hasn’t quite translated into medals, so I was really proud to have our Canadian flag go up once,” said Duehring.

“I’ve been on the podium a few times in this event and the rainbow jersey has eluded me, so I really wanted to go for it. I raced aggressively and a couple of times tried to make a move to get a lap, but Kirsten Wild was so strong out there and she wasn’t letting anyone get away,” she added.

Stefan Ritter was the only other Canadian athlete to race on Sunday, finishing 16th in the 1,000 metre time trial with a time of one minute and 1.923 seconds. Ritter raced with a broken clavicle from an early crash. Jeffrey Hoogland of the Netherlands won the world title.

“It’s not the ride I was hoping for,” admitted Ritter, “I was definitely hoping for a top-10. But considering that I could not do a bunch of kilo prep and we didn’t practice many starts because of my shoulder, honestly, I’m pretty happy with 16th. I did feel on the standing starts; it’s painful but I can push through it and I’m pretty lucky that I can still ride and race.”

Jacques Landry, Chief Technical Officer – Head Coach at Cycling Canada, said, “It’s not the best Track Worlds we’ve had, but certainly better than last year, when the men’s Team Pursuit squad crashed. Looking at the world championships as a whole, we have a lot of things to take home and work on. The men’s Team Pursuit rode really well and they are a lot more technically sound so we just have to do some fine tuning. In the women’s Team Pursuit, we didn’t have all of our ‘A’ riders here and still managed to finish fourth, so next year in the Olympic qualification window we expect to be stronger as we’ll have more riders to choose from and who will feed off each other to get better.”

“On the sprint side, Amelia [Walsh] is continuing to progress and with Lauriane Genest moving up the ranks, we may be in the running for the Team Sprint in the future. For the men, Hugo [Barrette] needs to be able to deliver more than one or two good rides, so he needs to build his capacity. Stefan [Ritter] continues to learn and progress, and just needs more racing practice to avoid making mistakes. All in all, there are a lot of takeaways; we know what we have to do and we just have to execute. I think we are in a good situation; we may not have some of the rankings we are used to, but that is just a temporary situation and we’ll be able to get back on track for when it really counts.”

Results

Women’s Points Race
1. Kirsten Wild (Netherlands) 49 pts
2. Jennifer Valente (USA) 43
3. Jasmin Duehring (Canada) 30
4. Gulnaz Badykova (Russia) 29
5. Charlotte Becker (Germany) 25
6. Trine Schmidt (Denmark) 24
7. Andrea Waldis (Switzerland) 23
8. Coralie Demay (France) 21
9. Sofia Arreola Navarro (Mexico) 20
10. Jolien D’hoore (Belgium 15
11. Letizia Paternoster (Italy) 10
12. Elinor Barker (Great Britain) 7
13. Ina Savenka (Belarus) 3
14. Verena Eberhardt (Austria) 2
15. Jarmila Machacova (Czech Republic) 0
16. Lydia Gurley (Ireland) 0
17. Ganna Solovei (Ukraine) 0
18. Katarzyna Pawlowska (Poland) 0
19. Anita Yvonne Stenberg (Norway) 0
20. Qianyu Yang (Hong Kong) -20
DNF Alzbeta Bacikova (Slovakia)
DNF Ane Iriarte Lasa (Spain)