USA Cycling announces Tokyo long teams

USA Cycling announces Tokyo long teams

clippedinJune 11, 2020

ArizonaCaliforniaMTBNationalNewsPremium NewsRoadStandard NewsTrack0 Comments0 views

USA Cycling announced the men’s and women’s mountain bike, road, and track Olympic long teams Thursday, naming the initial lists of athletes from which the final roster for the Olympic Games Tokyo 2020 will be selected next summer. Athletes are still eligible to make the Olympic long teams until May 2021.

Announced during a livestream hosted by Steve Schlanger, long-time NBC Cycling and Olympics announcer, the 38-person team was presented with the help of special guest actor, director, and Honorary Olympic Cycling Team Captain, Patrick Dempsey, and USA Cycling’s Chief of Sport Performance, Jim Miller.

“Obviously the delay of the Olympic Games Tokyo 2020 was a challenge, but we will be sending an even stronger team next summer and we could not be more excited,” said Rob DeMartini, USA Cycling’s President and CEO. “It is so inspiring to see these men and women who have worked their whole lives for this moment and to get one step closer to their Olympic dreams.”

The women’s mountain bike long team includes six automatic nominations.

Kate Courtney (Scott-SRAM Racing) will be the only candidate of the Olympic long team for mountain bike with an automatic place on the final team due to her fifth place at the 2019 UCI Mountain Bike World Championships in Mont-Sainte-Anne, Canada.

The women are sitting second as a nation in the Olympic Qualification Rankings. If they keep this ranking in 2021, two additional members of the women’s long team will join Courtney in Tokyo.

The men’s mountain bike long team includes two discretionary nominations. With the men’s current nation ranking, they will only have one member named to the final Olympic team.

On the road side, Chloé Dygert ( TWENTY20 Cycling) cemented her spot on the women’s road team with a decisive win in the elite women’s time trial at the 2019 UCI Road World Championships in Yorkshire, Great Britain.

Dygert will be joined by eight additional teammates on the women’s road Olympic long team. Like the women’s mountain bike team, all members of the road team meet the standard for the automatic qualification.

Seven men were named to the men’s road team. Of those seven, two were automatic nominations, with the remaining athletes nominated as discretionary choices by coaches based on their overall accumulative international results.

The women’s track long team includes nine automatic nominations.

Two of those team members are 2016 Olympic Games silver medalists Dygert and Jennifer Valente (TWENTY20 Cycling). The women’s team pursuit squad made the automatic nomination due to their recent UCI Track World Championship win with Dygert, Valente, Emma White (Rally Cycling) and Lily Williams (Rally Cycling).

On the men’s side, three athletes were named to the team with only one of them being an automatic nomination. Two of these athletes were discretionary nominations based on their World Cup and World Championship results.

“Being able to define our initial Olympic long team 13-months before the Olympic Games is a first for us,” said Jeff Pierce, USA Cycling’s Director of Elite Athletics. “Next June will be another defining moment where we will be able to announce the official team headed to Tokyo for Mountain Bike, Road, Track, BMX Racing and BMX Freestyle.”