There are fewer Canadians in this season’s UCI Track Champions League but the Canuck duo flying the flag in Europe had a fine start on Saturday in Paris’s Le vélodrome national de Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines. Dylan Bibic, the only Canadian to medal in the World Championships over the past three years, and last season’s Champions League endurance champion, won the scratch to lead the endurance category after Round 1. On his way to winning the 2023 endurance category, he snagged big scratch wins in Mallorca, Paris and Berlin and the Paris elimination race.
Last year in the Paris round, the Canadians ruled. After second place in Mallorca, Spain, Sarah van Dam took the scratch race with Maggie Coles-Lyster runner-up, while Bibic triumphed in both the scratch and the elimination competitions, and compatriot Mathias Guillemette came runner-up in the scratch.
Van Dam, sixth overall in 2023 and eighth in 2022, put herself in great position going forward by finishing just off the podium in the 30-lap scratch and eighth in the elimination, giving her seventh overall after Paris. She’s tied with three others on 21 points.
In Bibic’s scratch race, he had to hold off a tenacious French rider named Clement Petit in a breakaway quintet, but the Canadian tallied up another Champions League win.
In the elimination race, there was a sprint every two laps, with the last rider over the line given the yank. A Swiss chap was the first to get the hook. Bibic had to scramble not to be the eighth eliminated and was instead the 14th removed from the track to come fourth in the race. France’s Oscar Nilsson-Julien is closest to Bibic atop the endurance category.
The next rounds are next Saturday and Sunday in Apeldoorn, the Netherlands. The final rounds are December 6 and 7 in London’s Lee Valley Velopark.
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