Three age-group records broken on the 'Valdees'
YOUNG Sam Culverwell is on the mend and took top honours as several records fell at Sunday’s Le Val des Terres hill climb.
Just a month ago, the 17-year-old suffered an unfortunate halt to his main race season after crashing during a sprint for the line at the Junior Tour of Wales.
But the rider, who is only a few weeks out of hospital, showed good glimmers of form last weekend, starting from scratch time to set the winning mark of 2min. 1.5sec. over the closed-road hill climb despite some hindrance from a dropped chain.
Although Culverwell had previously exceeded this over the longer ‘open’ course two years ago, Sunday’s commendable comeback still earned him a new closed-road under-18 record.
Culverwell’s time remained uncontested by the remaining climbers but two of the club’s veterans impressed with age-group records of their own.
Although now in his mid-50s, defending course-record holder Nick Despres still managed to grind out a very respectable 2-05.1 for second overall.
This sliced nearly a minute off the previous V55 record and showed that the ‘King of the Hill’, whose 1-42.6 course record from 1991 remains to this day, still has life in his legs as he targets a place in the upcoming nationals.
Top time-trialists Marc Cox and Anthony Bleasdale claimed third and fourth respectively, while standing proudly among those further afield was another rider of club-record status.
This came in the form of V60 Greg Robert, who rode 2-48.1 to add another record to the day’s action.
Veteran star Karina Bowie topped the women’s ranks with 2-52.8, comfortably ahead of fellow Island Games cyclists Danielle Hanley and Maddie Wilson.
It was not just a show of quality and Guernsey Velo Club president Mark Smith gleefully welcomed an above-average turnout of 31 competitors successfully summitting the ‘Valdees’.
‘I am really pleased with how the event ran and it’s great that quite a lot of people came up for it,’ he said.
‘In the last few years, it has not had a great audience so it’s nice to see that we had really high numbers.’
Smith added that although the ‘road closed’ signs have been rare in recent editions of the annual climb, the event will be under review each year and the closed-road climb may become more frequent in time to come.
