Sunday 19/08/2007 - Rebecca James broke her old British National Under 16 Girls Record of 12.477 seconds for the flying 200 metres with a time of 12.130 seconds when qualifying fastest for the Under 16 girls match sprint competition. She then made light of the opposition in the 1st round and 1/4 finals.
Monday 20/08/2007 - Rebecca James easily won her semi-final in the match sprint competition 2 - nil. In the final she raced against Joanne Wilman. In the first heat Rebecca led from the front and won with room to spare. In the second heat, Rebecca left it late to make her move, but timed it with perfection to ride around Wilman to win the final 2 - nil and win the British Championship.
Alex Greenfield also won the Junior Girls Scratch race title.
Tuesday 21/08/2007 – Rebecca James set a time of 12.261 in qualifying second fastest behind world junior silver medallist Jess Varnish for the Junior Girls Match Sprint. She then made it easily through to the semi-finals.
Wednesday 22/08/2007 – Rebecca James won her junior sprint semi-final 2 – nil. In the final she came up against Jessica Varnish. In the first heat Rebecca controlled the race, but with just over 100 metres to go, she lost concentration and allowed Varnish to get the jump on her and she could not pull back the deficit. Without coming off the track she then went straight into the Under 16 girls 40 laps scratch race. Despite the race being a fairly frantic pace, Rebecca sat in towards the back of the bunch and started to make her move up through the strong field with about 7 laps to go. With 5 laps to go she was still in the middle of the bunch, but with 3 laps to go she was riding about 5th wheel at the top of the track. With just under 2 laps to go Rebecca made her move and her acceleration left the field for dead and she came home over half a straight ahead of the second placed rider and had plenty of time to celebrate coming over the line to add the British Scratch Championship to the match sprint title she won on Monday. With only about 15 minutes recovery time after the scratch race she then had the second heat of the junior match sprint final, but she did not quite have it in her legs to match Varnish and had to be content with a silver medal.
Thursday 23/08/2007 – In the Junior Women’s 500M TT, Rebecca was drawn last to go against Jess Varnish who had recently finished 4th in this event at the Junior World Championships in Mexico. Despite riding a restricted gear, Rebecca’s start out of the gate was much better than Jessica’s and she kept her rhythm going to the finish to win by just seven hundredth's of a second, break her old British National Record she had set the previous August, and pick up her third title of the week.
Friday 24/08/2007 – In the Under 16 Girls 500M TT, once again Rebecca was drawn last to go. Despite five days of hard racing, Rebecca was able to raise her performance just one more time to break the national record she had set the day before and claim her fourth gold of the week to go with her one silver.
To cap an excellent week for the Pinarello Race Team at the Championships, Jessica Allen, with the help of her team mate Alex Greenfield, rode a very strong Junior Girls Point’s Race to win her first national track championships title. Over the six days of racing the Pinarello R.T. picked up 8 golds (Rebecca x 4, Peter x 2, Jessica and Alex 1 each) 1 silver (Rebecca) and 1 bronze (Peter Kennaugh).
Words: David James
