Club Briefs

  Photo courtesy of Leah Hoyer UCLA graduate student
Alex Smith won the collegiate national road
race.

UCLA has national cycling champion

UCLA cyclist Alex Smith is the new Collegiate National Road Race
champion. He and five other Bruins, both men and women, competed in
the National Collegiate Road Cycling Championships last weekend in
Colorado Springs, Colo.

Smith finished the hilly 63-mile, seven-lap course in two hours,
56 minutes and 12 seconds. He bested nearly 120 racers to claim
UCLA’s first National Cycling title in six years, as well as
UCLA’s first-ever road race title.

For the first two laps of the race, Smith stayed with the lead
pack. On the third lap, several riders made attempts to break away
from the group.

“They did a lot of damage to the pack, but I was able to
stay with those attacks so it boosted my confidence,” Smith
said. “My strategy was to get away either on the hill through
a hard attack or try to break away on the flats, because if it came
down to a sprint, I would probably lose.”

With less than two laps to go, Smith launched an attack on a
short climb. The rest of the pack hesitated long enough to allow
him to break away.

Smith rode for several miles with a 30-second lead over his
nearest attacker. But with five miles left in the race, he broke a
spoke on his rear wheel. “I couldn’t stop for a wheel
change. I knew it would have put me out of first place and
I’d rather lay it on the line and go for it,” Smith
said.

He crossed the finish line just eight seconds ahead of Jed
Schneider of Kansas.

“I knew that Alex (Smith) had mechanical problems and on
the last climb I tried to shorten the gap between us,”
Schneider said. “He took off and is such a strong rider that
I couldn’t go with him.”

Smith, a graduate student in urban planning, is also a former
collegiate national mountain bike champion. He has hoped to win a
national road racing championship since 1997, when he qualified for
nationals as an undergraduate at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo.
“That year I felt that I had a really good chance to win. It
was also in Colorado, and I like altitude and climbs,” he
said.

That year, however, the race was cancelled due to snow, so he
had to wait four years to give it another shot. “This has
been my goal for a long time,” Smith said. “I
hadn’t won a race all season, but I have been training to
peak at nationals.”

This is Smith’s first year with the UCLA cycling team and
his presence helped round out a strong men’s team. Three
other UCLA men joined Smith at nationals. Team captain Elijah
Pfister finished 49th in the road race after working to keep Smith
at the front of the pack and suffering a flat tire with seven miles
to go. Graduate student Peter Brown, one of the strongest sprinters
on the team, placed 63rd in the road race and 44th in the
criterium. Freshman Pat Schmidt placed 58th in his first national
road race.

The team was hurt by the absence of senior rider Stephen Flynn,
who is in Europe with the U.S. National Team.

“I really think we could have taken first and second in
the road race had Steve been here,” said Pfister.

Two Bruin women also competed. Leah Hoyer, a graduate student in
animation, placed 37th in the road race and Melanie Hamon, a
graduate microbiology student placed 69th.

“This has been a building year for the women’s
team,” Hoyer said. “Our star cyclist was injured and
has been out for the season. The rest of us have been training hard
and have made a lot of improvements. With some vigorous recruitment
and off-season training, we’re hoping to be even stronger
next year.”

Anyone interested in competing with the cycling team can e-mail
[email protected].

Club presidents can send club information to [email protected].