2010 and looking towards the Olympics

There's quite an interesting Luke Webber interview with Phil Dixon, the Great Britain XC coach, at http://new.britishcycling.org.uk/mtb/article/mtb20091123-Road-To-2012-Part-3-0 in which the plans for 2010 and onwards are discussed. It looks like Annie Last, Lily Matthews, Dave Fletcher etc. will be doing fewer races and less travelling than in 2009. The hard work done by GB's Elite Female racers in 2009 to close the gap on other nations for Olympic qualification means at least there is now a chance of seeing someone on the start line in 2012 in both Elite Male and Female, which didn't appear at all likely 12 months ago. Once the year end UCI rankings are available, we'll know how many nation points GB have amassed from 01/01/2008-31/12/2009 and hence what needs to be done before 31/12/2011 to ensure a least 1 rider in both the Elite Male and Elite Female XCO events at the next Olympics.

There's also talk of R&D work for mountain bike XC which, combined with the news that British Cycling are working with the F1-related McLaren Advanced Technologies, could lead to some interesting developments and components I hope. It's been good to see the GB racers experimenting with different kit this year, for example Reynolds carbon rims and Dugast tubular tyres used by Fletcher and Last for much of the season, the relatively rare FRM CU2 M18 double chainsets or Oli Beckingsale's 1x9 gear set up with chain device.

As far as I can see, there's no news to date on which team or teams the GB Podium or Academy Programme riders will be riding for. Rebecca Romero has been doing some MTB XC racing recently, however, and since it seems likely that her track specialism won't be possible in the 2012 Games, I wonder if she might consider changing sport once again?!

* edit* According to the interview with Joolze Dymond at http://www.xcracer.com/ , Rebecca may do some more XC racing with a view to trying some BMBS national level XC racing in 2010, which could be interesting...