The Giant Dijon Track Team dreams of the team pursuit – News
The Giant Dijon Track Team is off again for a new lap. This season, the UCI track team has been reinforced. It has five runners, including Christos Volikakis, former Junior World Champion in keirin converted to endurance and vice-European champion in scratch and elimination. They are therefore five runners (see the squad). “It was Christos who asked to come to our house. Our recruits are isolated runners with whom we already meet on the races. Yacine Chalel had already been in the same team as Joffrey (Degueurce) at Bison Sport», recalls Noëlle Jeanteau Degueurce, the team manager.
The little troop is meeting this weekend in Portugal for its first gathering. On the program are road outings and two days of competition on the Anadia track, Saturday and Sunday. “We will have a second two-week course in February, still in Portugal, to train on the Anadia track.“, adds the team director. The month of January will also be busy with competitions: the French Championship in Roubaix for Joffrey Degueurce and two events in Spain. “At the end of April we will go to the Athens Grand Prix and we will try to do a new training camp in Greece, on track and on the road, on this occasion.“.
Noëlle Jeanteau Degueurce also has a project she wants to submit to her riders: setting up a pursuit team. “This is my dream. It’s a magnificent discipline, it’s clean, it’s the culmination of cycling“, she says. And if she is attached to this project, “it’s already because it’s a team, you have to be united. They all done chasing, they know what it’s like and Christos could be our starter“. The manager of Giant Dijon Track Team is also well aware of the scarcity of opportunities to practice team pursuit outside the Championships, because of the programs of track meetings which ignore this discipline. But the dream remains well annexed. “If everyone agrees, we will train for the pursuit at the February camp.“.