They're everywhere, those Archibalds. We've no sooner finished congratulating Katie on bringing home gold from Rio than brother John pops up and grabs the Scottish "25" Mile Time Trial title. Here's what the most improved man in Scottish cycling had to say to VeloVeritas the day after his fine win where he relegated "50" and "100" champion, Jon Entwistle into silver medal spot by 25 seconds recording 50:03 to take gold.
We had a feeling we’d be chatting to this gentleman again, after the ‘100’ championship – and so it proved. Originally scheduled to be held up on the Cromarty Firth but postponed due to bad weather the Scottish ‘100’ championship was incorporated with the Furneaux Trophy in the Aberdeen District and won by their reigning ‘50’ champion, Jon Entwistle (Team JMC) – we caught up with him soon after he’d achieved his ‘double.’
Velo Club Vitesse, an Irvine based club, is proud to have been selected to run the Scottish Junior Road Race Championship for 2016. This is the first occasion for quite some time that Scotland’s junior road riders have had a separate championship race of their own. We are pleased to be reinstating this important event and bringing it to the challenging roads of North Ayrshire on Sunday 11 th of September.
A clean sprint and Evan Oliphant bags win number seven in the Scottish Road Race Championship. I suspect it wasn’t coincidence that he was assigned number 7 as his race number today, a nice touch. The result had a familiar ring to it though, if you were to look at the past ten years of championship results. Don't however, be deceived into thinking this was anything other than a very well organised race on a very demanding circuit and what was lacking in glamour was more than made up for in grit shown by the riders on a day of mixed weather on bleak moorland roads.
Yours truly didn’t make it to the Scottish Olympic or Ten Mile Time Trial Championships; unlike our editor, Martin who took excellent pictures at both races and framed reports. ‘I’ll interview both winners,’ said I, to make amends for life getting in the way of cycling. So my thanks extend to Chris Smart (GTR) for winning both events and making life easy for me.
Chris Smart (GTR) put on another exemplary performance in the Tour of the Meldons hilly time trial in the Scottish Borders to retain his national title for the 'Olympic Time Trial' for the third time in a row, his 56:08 being 75 seconds faster than his time for the same course last year and 67 seconds faster than silver medallist Kyle Gordon (Sandy Wallace Cycles). Third was Jon Entwistle (Team JMC) a further 10 seconds back.