JENNY HOLL became Scotland’s youngest national champion at the British Track Cycling Championships in Manchester over the weekend when she took gold in the team pursuit as part of the Team Breeze quartet.
Alongside her teammates Abigail Dentus, Rebecca Raybould and Jessica Roberts, they rode to a comfortable victory over Team Backstedt-Hotchille in the final and 18 year-old Holl admits that she could not be more delighted about getting her hands on a national champions jersey.”It’s pretty cool to be British champion – it was a good race and I’m really happy to have done it with the girls,” she said.
“Coming in, I knew we had a good chance but there were some other good teams out there so it’s great to have won. And it’s nice to have performed well when it mattered.”
Holl is one of Scotland’s most promising young riders and the teenager relocated from Scotland to Manchester last year having been invited to join the British Cycling programme. Having spent the last few months settling in, she is now feeling right at home in the velodrome that is dubbed ‘the medal factory’ due to the number of world and Olympic medallists it produces. “It feels really strange to be calling Manchester my home track but things are going great and it’s amazing to be training down here,” the teenager said.
“We were away in Majorca and we’re going back there again next week for more warm-weather training – it’s a hard life, isn’t it? I really am living the dream – it’s brilliant.”
The Commonwealth Games in April are likely to come just a touch too early for Holl to gain selection but she is wholly satisfied with her rate of improvement and is confident that if she continues as she is, good things lie ahead. “If the Commonwealth Games had been this time next year, that would have been better for me but with them being in a couple of months, I think that’s going to be a little soon for me,” she said.
“I’m really happy with my progress though and if things keep going as they are, I’ll be really pleased. I’m going into a road block now so I’ll be back racing on the road - there’s some races in Belgium then the national series and the tour series back in the UK. And I’m hoping to be selected for the European under-23 championships in the summer – if I could do that, that would be amazing.”
Holl was just one of a number of Scots who picked up a British title in Manchester over the weekend. 20 year-old Jack Carlin put in a hugely impressive performance to take gold in the sprint, defeating the vastly more experienced Welshman Lewis Olivia in the final.
Carlin is also based in Manchester and his progress has been remarkable, with his senior sprint title at the weekend the first British title he has won in any age-group.
His form bodes well for the Commonwealth Games in April, with the Scottish sprint squad also likely to include Olympic champion Callum Skinner, who won silver in the kilo on Saturday, Jonathan Wale who finished in fifth place in the kilo and Jamie Alexander, who was fifth in the keirin.
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