Gilmore Keeps Wheels Turning
Illawarra Mercury
Saturday December 8, 2001
There will be no rest for Rochelle Gilmore over the forthcoming festive season.
More like the hectic season for the Illawarra teenage cycling sensation.
Australian criterium cycling champion and 2001 Giro d'Italia stage winner Gilmore is striving for selection in the Australian cycling team for the 2002 Manchester Commonwealth Games.
She has set herself a gruelling schedule of training and elite competition in an attempt to achieve her goal.
Gilmore, 19, left her home base in Stanwell Tops this week for a pre-Commonwealth Games road cycling camp at the Australian Institute of Sport in Canberra.
She will then attend a pre-Commonwealth Games track camp in Adelaide for two weeks with simulated testing and track training.
The camp includes an international night at the Adelaide Superdrome on December 15 where selectors will check the form of riders for possible Commonwealth Games selection.
After three weeks of camps, Gilmore will return home for a week before racing in the six-day Christmas-New Year track carnivals from December 26 to January 1, at Victorian tracks including Bendigo, Echuca, Ararat and Shepparton.
She then goes to the Skilled Engineering Bay Classic Criterium series in Melbourne, racing on the road every day from January 2 to 6 in criteriums of up to 45 minutes.
``This is definitely one of Rochelle's main goals for the summer ," Gilmore's manager Phil Wilson said.
Gilmore will then compete in the Australian Open Road Championships on Sunday, January 12, followed by round one of the road World Cup in Canberra and the Tour de Snowy, which attracts the best overseas female road cyclists.
© 2001 Illawarra Mercury