Goat-roasting mountain bikers dominate downhill race at Myanmar National Cycling Championships

After a four-year hiatus, Myanmar’s national cycling championships returned with a vengeance from December 2 to 6, with hard-fought medals awarded in the disciplines of road racing, BMX, mountain bike downhill and mountain bike cross-country.

The Myanmar Cycling Federation (MCF), which organized the event, underwent major restructuring in 2014 and last year set about reviving the sport in the country by holding more events and bringing in more sponsors, such as Myan Shwe Pyi Tractors, Myanmar CP Livestock, 100 Plus and AMI Insurance.

“This is the second year we started seriously organizing cycling races, and the first time in four years we have held the national cycling championships. I think overall it’s a great start,” said MCF president Khin Maung Win.

“There’s a lot of enthusiasm among the cyclists. This event has focused more on elite riders, so we don’t see heavy participation from all the cyclists out there who have emerged in the past two or three years. There are many cyclists out there, but this level of competition is something new in Myanmar.”

The championships kicked off with a three-day road stage race. Prizes were awarded to the top finishers on each day, but the national champion’s jersey was given to the cyclist who completed all three days with the fastest accumulated time.

The first race saw the field of 42 competitors ride 160 kilometers (100 miles) from Nyaung U to Meiktila. A crash on a sandy section of road about 30km into the race took down 10 riders, all of whom were able to remount and continue racing. The combination of hills and stiff headwind split the field into small groups, with SEA Games veteran Soe Thant from the National A Team taking the win in a time of 4 hours, 48 minutes, 18 seconds. His teammate Aung Phyo Min finished second at 3 seconds, while third-place Zin Lin Ko crossed the line 2m 16s behind the winner.

Day two from Meiktila to Pyinmana was similarly contested over 160km, but the course was flatter and swifter than day one. Another crash occurred about 20km into the race when an errant canine dashed through the middle of the group of fast-moving cyclists, causing Aung Ko Oo (Speed Team) to hit the deck. The unfortunate cyclist suffered a broken leg and was taken to hospital for surgery.

Meanwhile, Aung Phyo Paing (National A Team) and Sai Aung Kham (GTM A Team) escaped the field and finished first and second in 4h 4m. Zin Lin Ko led the main field across the line more than 10 minutes later.

The third and final road stage was a 30km time trial on wide roads around Wunna Theikdi Stadium in Nay Pyi Taw, with each rider starting individually at one-minute intervals. The day’s race was won by Kyaw Tun Oo (GTM A Team) in 39m 19s, but the overall national championship title went to Aung Phyo Min, whose accumulated time of 9h 38m 37s over three days of racing bested second-place Soe Thant by 42 seconds and Zin Lin Ko in third by 3 minutes.

On day four, the championships moved to Mount Pleasant in Nay Pyi Taw, the venue for the 2013 SEA Games BMX and mountain bike races. Zar Ni (GTM) out-pedaled 22 competitors to win the BMX championship, while Aung Naing Tun (Mandalay Free Riders) was fastest on the mountain bike downhill course, making it to the bottom in 2m 53s. His MFR teammates dominated the day, sweeping the top 10 spots.

Aung Win Tun – manager of the Mandalay Free Riders team, which prepared for the race by guzzling beer and roasting a goat on a flagpole the night before – noted that Aung Naing Tun’s time was on par with medalists at the 2013 SEA Games. “He rode an awesome speed. He’s racing at the elite professional level,” Aung Win Tun said.

Aung Naing Tun, who has been competing for eight years and who bested second-place Aung Paing Soe by 7 seconds, said he did not find the downhill course particularly difficult.

“The tracks we ride in Mandalay are more difficult than the course in Nay Pyi Taw. This track is better for riding at high speed, but it’s not technically difficult,” he said.

The national cycling championships closed on December 6 with the mountain bike cross-country race, consisting of five laps of a tough 4.4km course that included several technical sections and some very steep climbs and descents. Winner Ben Rowse (Bike World A Team) covered the course in 1h 17s, beating the previous day’s BMX champion Zar Ni by 1m 41s.

Although Rowse is Australian, he was named Myanmar national champion by virtue of an MCF rule stipulating that foreign residents are eligible to take the title.

“The mountain bike track was really good. A lot of the riders struggled, but it’s good that they can see what a challenging track is like and what they need to improve on,” Rowse said.

“There were some good riders out in the front. One guy [Zar Ni] was pushing me all the way to the finish. I think he crashed on the fourth lap and couldn’t catch back up, so I got a bit of a break and managed to win.”

Bike World team manager Jeff Parry said he was happy with how his riders performed, considering they were competing against the top national cyclists.

“In the mountain bike section, I think we excelled. We came in first and seventh places, and the winner comfortably came in first,” Parry said. “The course was certainly up to Asian international standards. It was fast in places, with a couple of steep climbs and sections that were technically challenging. I think it’s been a successful five days of cycling.”

MCF president Khin Maung Win said he hopes to build on the momentum of the national championships.

“One positive thing I see is that are a lot of new sponsors coming on board,” he said. “And of course the most exciting part for me is the young 18- or 19-year-old cyclists winning. They are showing great potential. That’s the future of cycling. Going forward, we want to go into the middle schools and high schools so the younger kids can enjoy competitive cycling.”

Hammer time at the Tour of Thailand

Kyaw Tun Oo of the Myanmar National Team gets a water bottle hand-up during the Tour of Thailand.

In the sport of bicycle racing, the word “hammer” has several uses. It can be a verb indicating the act of riding very hard and very fast while feeling no pain: “He hammered up the hill, leaving everyone gasping in his wake.” To “put the hammer down” is to initiate the act the hammering.

In the noun form, a “hammer” is a cyclist renowned for his ability to hammer. And to “get hammered” is to be spat out the back of the race as the result of the efforts of hammers who are hammering away at the front. As the old saying goes, sometimes you’re the hammer, and sometimes you’re the anvil.

In this year’s Tour of Thailand bicycle stage race, held in the country’s northeast from April 1 to 6, the five-man Myanmar National Team were among those who got hammered.

The Myanmar team (left to right): Ben Rowse, Chit Ko Ko, Soe Thant, Kyaw Tun Oo and Mang Tin Kung.

Myanmar was one of seven national teams – along with Thailand, Malaysia, Vietnam, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Bahrain – invited to take part in this year’s race. The 13 other participants were sponsored trade teams from Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines, China, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Kazakhstan, Iran and the Netherlands. The races on each day ranged in length from 132 kilometers (82 miles) to 231km for a total distance of 1057km. Like the Tour de France, there was a stage winner each day, plus a “general classification” based on the riders’ accumulated overall times.

As a member of the Myanmar Cycling Federation’s executive committee in charge of road cycling development, I accompanied the team to Thailand in the capacity of manager, which, despite my three decades of involvement in the sport, was a role I had never before filled. I once read an interview with the manager of a professional cycling team who said the best days for any team’s support staff were those in which nothing dramatic happened in the race. It was only after surviving Stage 1 of the Tour of Thailand that I came to fully appreciate these words.

The first clue that things might go wrong occurred at the team meeting the night before the race started, when I drew number 13 in the lottery to determine the order of the 20 support vehicles that would follow the riders. Professional cyclists in Europe who are assigned 13 usually pin the numbers upside down onto their jerseys to undo any potential ill luck. But when it came time for me to affix those impious numerals to our pickup truck, I thought, “This is Asia. Thirteen isn’t considered unlucky here,” and stuck them on right-side up. The gremlins of misfortune must have chortled in glee at my dim-witted miscalculation, but I was deaf to their spiteful mirth.

Indeed, the first day of the Tour of Thailand was nothing short of a calamity for our team. Just 30km into the 187km race from Ubon Ratchathani to Mukdahan, the race radio crackled with the news that there had been a high-speed crash, and that one of Myanmar’s riders was involved.

As manager and driver of the support vehicle carrying our spare bikes and wheels, it was my job to put the pedal to the metal, drive like a bedlamite to the accident site and offer assistance to our stricken rider.

Urged on by the hysterical shrieks of Myanmar coaches U Naing Win and U Khin Myint, who were with me in the truck, I pulled up to the scene of carnage to find one of our cyclists, Mang Tin Kung, sitting in the middle of the road already getting his injured wrist bandaged by medical personnel. Meanwhile, the frantic coaches leapt from the pickup and performed some quick repairs on the damaged bicycle. Within seconds, Mang Tin Kung was back in the saddle and on his way.

Among the daily spectators were elderly cyclists inspired to take up the sport by recreational rides held in honour of the country’s king and queen.

Bicycle racers are generally a resilient lot – the polar opposite of football players, who can’t seem to stop themselves from flopping to the ground in feigned injury whenever another player passes within half a meter – and despite skidding across the scorching-hot pavement at 50kph, Mang Tin Kung was keen to continue racing. Unfortunately, circumstances conspired against him: Unable to grip the handlebars due to his fractured wrist, and stuck in a monstrously high gear compliments of a broken rear derailleur, he gamely struggled on in agony for more than 10km before realizing there was no way he could catch the main group of nearly 100 riders, who were racing at full tilt and weren’t about to slow down for anyone. Mang Tin Kung’s race was over before it had even begun.

From this bleak start, the day never really improved. Not long after Mang Tin Kung’s retirement, and before we had even reached the halfway point, another of our cyclists – Australian Ben Rowse, the sole non-Myanmar rider on the team – suffered a flat tire just as the race pace was increasing from torrid to downright infernal. Again I responded to the race officials’ radio instructions to speed forward like a lunatic to where Rowse was awaiting mechanical succor by the roadside. The coaches tossed him a spare wheel, and he was quickly back on the road chasing the relentlessly charging peloton.

Incredibly, after pedaling furiously for nearly 30 minutes – all the while, his bike computer unhelpfully informing him that his heart was thumping away in excess of 180 beats per minute – Rowse was able to catch back up to the main group. But he squandered all of his physical resources doing so and, a few kilometers later and sapped of all energy, he dropped off the back and was forced to abandon.

The teams begin to gather for the start of another day at the Tour of Thailand.

By the finish line, two more Myanmar National Team riders – Chit Ko Ko and Soe Thant – had also quit, victims of the first stage’s Tour-de-France-worthy average pace of 45kph over more than four hours of racing in 38 Celsius heat. They were simply undertrained and psychologically unprepared for the difficulties of the day. That left us with one finisher, 21-year-old Kyaw Tun Oo, who crossed the line tucked safely in the main field more than 10 minutes behind a couple of smaller, faster groups of riders who had taken off up the road.

While our riders were getting hammered out on the course, I was also facing personal challenges in my first experience as a support vehicle driver, which basically involves several hours of fighting for position on limited road space with 19 other team car drivers, all of whom are intent on handing up water bottles and food to their riders, changing wheels as quickly as possible when flat tires occur, and fixing bikes that have been broken by crashes. I was just happy to make it through the day without nose-diving into a roadside ditch or running anyone over.

The good news was that after Stage 1, the rest of the race was relatively incident-free as far as we were concerned. This was largely due to the fact that, according to the rules of stage racing, riders must finish each stage to continue the next day. Our team’s four abandons from Stage 1 were therefore out of the race for good, meaning that U Naing Win, U Khin Myint and I only had Kyaw Tun Oo to look after for the remaining five stages. Each day Kyaw Tun Oo finished strongly in the main group, avoiding crashes and suffering only one flat tire, on Stage 3, after which he was able to chase back to the main group without much trouble.

Kyaw Tun Oo’s riding was astute enough to catch the attention of the other teams, and managers from the Netherlands, Taiwan, Malaysia and other countries approached to tell me how impressed they were with his performance, despite the obvious shortcomings of Myanmar’s national team program.

Sweat-drenched Kyaw Tun Oo survives Stage 2. Only four more days to go.

Like most institutions under this country’s odious military government of decades past, for years the Myanmar Cycling Federation was largely dysfunctional, contributing little to the advancement of the sport and, at times, actively suppressing its development – this latter point was aptly illustrated by a bewildering incident in 2005 when MCF officials actually called in the police to prevent a well-organized and well-sponsored mountain bike race from taking place north of Yangon.

But in the past couple of years the federation has turned a page under a new president who is passionate about, and understands, the sport of cycling. More races are taking place each year, and more riders are participating in these competitions. Most important, more locals are simply getting out on their bikes for recreation under the auspices of vital, independent organizations like Bicycle Network Myanmar.

For now, Myanmar’s top riders are struggling just to finish big international races like the Tour of Thailand, but the pool of potential champions is set to grow, and it won’t be long before a hammer from Myanmar is hammering at the front of the pack, putting the hurt on the cyclists getting hammered at the rear of the peloton.

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This article was originally published in the July 22-28 edition of The Myanmar Times Weekend magazine.

 

 

Myanmar Cycling Federation seeks to build on success of Asian BMX Championships

The 10^th Asian Continental BMX Championships, held in Nay Pyi Taw on October 31, not only provided a day of exciting international competition – it was also the first cycling event ever held in Myanmar with official endorsement from the sport’s governing body, the International Cycling Union (UCI).

The BMX race was attended by Boowong Choi, secretary general of the Asian Cycling Confederation under the UCI, who said he was dedicated to bringing championship-level events to as many Asian countries as possible.

“We have 11 Southeast Asian countries in the ACC but only a few have held championship events. Cambodia, Laos, Brunei and others have never organized events at the championship level. If we give them more chances to host races, cycling will grow in the region,” he said.

In that regard, Myanmar is now ahead of the game in Southeast Asia after having hosted last weekend’s competition. But there is still much room for improvement, he said.

“The level of organization in Myanmar is low compared with Europe, Korea, China – but with more experience I think they will improve,” Choi said.

Myanmar Cycling Federation president U Khin Maung Win agreed that local organizers still had much to learn, but added that for a first-time event in Myanmar, everything came together surprisingly well.

“There was fantastic participation from a lot of Asian countries. There was a lot of support from the UCI. So the future looks good,” he said. “This is another milestone in creating better awareness about cycling in Myanmar. We’re very, very excited.”

Thai-American racer Amanda Carr, who won gold in the Elite Women’s event and who also serves as a BMX track operator in Florida in the United States, said the championships in Nay Pyi Taw were a “really good start for the country”.

“It’s nice to see how much Myanmar is investing into BMX as a sport,” she said.

Among the shortcomings mentioned by participants was the design of the track, which was built for use in the 2013 SEA Games. But BMX racers are a hearty bunch, and they weren’t about to let poorly banked corners or rough surfaces get them down.

“The track here is unique,” elite-level Japanese rider Takamasa Sampei said diplomatically, “so we just have to adjust the way we ride.”

Such problems can potentially be addressed in the near future, as the MCF is currently considering whether to build a new BMX track on land allotted by the Ministry of Sports in North Dagon township.

A short cross-country mountain bike course is already under construction at the site, which will be inaugurated with races scheduled from December 11 to 13.

The federation has also been allotted a 9800-square-metre plot in Kyaikkasan sports ground, which is suitable for construction of a velodrome. However, no funding has been allocated, nor has a time-frame for construction been set.

As for future UCI-sanctioned events, Mr Choi has already opened discussions with the MCF about holding the Asian Continental Mountain Bike Championships in Myanmar in late 2016 or early 2017. Let the nationwide search for world-class cross-country and downhill courses begin.