The warm weather creeping back into New England is welcome news for the Tufts cycling team.
Last weekend, the team participated in the Rutgers Eastern Collegiate Cycling Conference season opener in New Jersey. Tufts fared well as a team, while also racking up several high individual finishes in the competitive field.
The team finished 11th in the circuit race, with Olivia Jaras individually placing ninth in the Women's A Race to earn 30 points. The team improved in the criterium and team time trial races, finishing sixth in both. Freshman Vince Chavanon took first in the individual Men's B race for the criterium and third for the team trial race, and now has the chance to move up from the B team to the A team.
"Our first race of the season went really well," senior co-captain Olivia Jaras said. "For being such a small school, placing sixth or seventh against 30 or so teams was impressive."
The heavily stacked field, which included Div. I schools like Harvard, MIT and Yale, made the Jumbos' finish even more impressive. The team fields a group of riders expanded both in numbers and talent from last year's squad. In the 2004-2005 season, the team usually sent around 10 riders to each event. This year, however, the Jumbos field a team almost twice as large.
The Jumbos will ride this weekend's success to Philadelphia on Saturday and Sunday for the Schuylkill Challenge and Phat Philly Phlyer, co-hosted by Penn and Drexel.
Tufts will send 19 bikers to the event to compete in team time trials, circuit races and the criterium. Competition will again be fierce, as the field will feature Penn State, Princeton, Harvard, Vermont and UNH.
The team time trial race on Saturday will feature small groups of three to four cyclists riding together against the clock in certain formations. The circuit race, also held on Saturday, will take place on the U.S. professional cycling tour's track. The weekend will wrap up on Lemon Hill with the criterium event, in which cyclists participate in a full-throttle race around a shorter course.
To prepare for the weekends' events, the team is conducting intense workouts at the gym as well as strategic planning outside of its physical regimen. However, the Jumbos plan to take it easy for the latter part of the week.
"It's always important to rest as hard as you train or else you get burned out," junior Katie Dunn said.
Both Dunn and Jaras have high expectations this weekend after their showing in New Jersey. They hope to increase their point totals, which accumulate over multiple races, in order to qualify the team for Nationals, which will take place in May in Lawrence, Kan. and will include the top 25 riders from the Men's and Women's A Categories.
"I'm pretty sure Dunn, Chavanon and I will definitely qualify as individuals [to the National Championships]," Jaras said. "If we get enough points, we can qualify our whole team to go. We're racking in points like we've never done before as a team."
