ProBikeKit were one of the lucky few to have been invited to the Launch of the Podium Ambition Pro Cycling powered by Club La Santa – adidas press release event in Manchester on the 26th Jan. The launch of the new team is a very exciting time for us, the riders, adidas, and their sponsors as the strong Women’s Pro Cycling Team are set to achieve big things going into the 2016 season.
We had the chance to see the new range of adidas evil eye half rim promoting all its cool features and how this benefits the riders, including a photocromatic lens and clear vision lenses to aid performance and reaction times for riders. Watch the video below to see the innovative design of these adidas sunglasses and how they work:
We caught up with the co-founder and team leader of Podium Ambition Ltd – Dame Sarah Storey – to tell us all about the new Podium Ambition Pro Cycling powered by Club La Santa Team, the Boot Out Breast Cancer Club (BOBC), and their plans for the upcoming 2016 season.
ProBikeKit’s Interview with Dame Sarah Storey
- Question: How did you decide on who was going to be in the team?
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Answer:
“We’ve had hundreds and hundreds of applications to the team, so many applications that we could probably run ten teams quite easily! It’s amazing the number of riders that aspire to be at the highest level, it’s absolutely amazing, we’re all very honoured to see that people want to be a part of that, so we have to whittle it down to riders that we know, that we’ve worked with, and riders that we’ve already had our eye on – we’ll approach riders who are doing exceptionally well. It’s amazing the difference between different applications as well, so we’ll get applications from riders who talk about what they want the team to do for them, which is the worst kind of application. Then we’ll get riders who talk about what they can do for the team, what’s inspired them about the current team, and why they want to be involved. Then you get applications from riders saying I’d like to consider riding for you could you send me some more info and so it’s amazing how quickly and easy it is to whittle down the applications.”
- Question: How does the race selection work?
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Answer:
“We set out a road programme that we’ll support and they can choose to ride other races around that and the equipment that they are provided with allows them to race independently, we’ll provide race wheels for specific races and it’s kind of a programme whereby we’ll set out a race programme that we believe will allow the maximum opportunity for them to improve in all areas. So we’re not solely focused on one particular type of road racing. We really encourage time trials, perhaps more than any other team because if you want to be a professional on the road, if you’re not a great time trialist it doesn’t matter but you still need to be able to get through the time trial stage easily, so we really encourage time trials and they get the equipment for that as well – we’re also looking for opportunities outside of the UK as well. We’re currently finalising a calendar that is supported and then outside of that they can race other races but that will be at their own discretion and for their own training and those races we believe will give them the exposure they need to hard racing and provide the stepping stone to the next level because Women’s UCI racing is really fast, really hard and there’s a big big difference to surviving and finishing the race to being in that race and we need to fill that gap, we need to allow riders to race in the UK and be sufficiently capable from when they’ve raced in the UK to take that step easily and that gap is still quite big so we’re hoping that by setting that programme will help bridge that gap a little bit more.”