May 21, 2007 — Canadian rider, Ryan Mackenzie (Trek-VW), has sent us this preliminary report from Venezuela where the Canadian Team has settled in to prepare for the competition that begins today. We will be in contact as much as possible given the internet conditions Mackenzie describes in his first report:

Pre-Competition

Coming to the Pan Am Championships is kind of like going to the grocery store. You know sometimes you just walk up and down the store aisles and things that you don’t really need end up in your cart, while other aisles have great deals on useful items. In a very abstract way it’s the kind of the situation we have.

The whole team arrived here together in Valencia, Venezuela late Friday (May 18) night after puddle-jumping from either the Burnaby Velodrome in the west or the Bromont Training Center in the east. Sprinters and staff along with us boys with stamina. In total we are 13, tightly packed into four quick-mart-sized rooms at the Deportivo Olympicado (Olympic Training Center) along with all the other countries from this side of the hemisphere.

Over the next week we will all be doing as much as we can to come back to Canada with a little hardware around our necks – that’s right, medals. They’re what we came to the Pan Am Road and Track Championships “grocery store” in search of.

In the sprinters’ aisle we have Yannick Morin, Lorence Leroux and Cam McKinnon who are on special duty for the Olympic sprint, Match Sprint and Keirin races. Over on aisle six we have the women, Gina Grain, who will be tearing it up in the bunch races and on the other side is junior sprint prodigy Monique Sullivan who will take home some major experience from this event but also has an excellent chance at owning this track with the power she showed the other week at the trials in Burnaby. Then, way over in the endurance aisle we have Zach Bell, who will be looking for “sales” in the points race, with Martin Gilbert and myself, Ryan Mckenzie, who are hoping to clean up on aisle 12 in the Scratch race and Madison races.

In between all of us we find a plethora of things that are going to help us on our shopping spree and many things we don’t really need. For example, last night there was a concert – some sort of Venezuelan rave across the street from our living quarters, with at least 50,000 people. The music was loud enough that we could have had our own dance party in our quarters. I was lucky enough to have brought earplugs but many others talked about their night of base and beats that went on “˜til five in the morning. The US riders apparently saw two girls get kidnapped and thrown into a van the other day. Martin and I ate a plume of blue smoke while motor pacing yesterday.

Apart from that the food has gotten better every day so far, and the showers work well despite the fact they are only mono-temperature – and it’s the complete opposite of the humid air outside. In general the drivers and people are really courteous to us in our maple leaf outfits.

These are circumstances that we cyclists have been through in the past few days while earning our place here at the Pan American Championships. Over the next week we will ignore our fears of giant four-inch grasshoppers and capitalize on this major stepping stone to the Beijing Olympic Games in 2008.

Hopefully the IT guy, who we have slipped a couple bucks to let us into the computer lab, will be there all week and I can keep the stories coming to pedalmag.com. The racing starts today with Mckinnon, Morin and Sullivan in the Keirin rounds. Let the shopping begin!