Leon Dumbell shows off his trophy from the world BMX champs.
The Te Awamutu BMX Club is celebrating after one of its members picked up a Commonwealth Games gold medal and two others shone at the BMX world champs – where one finished with a ranking of third in the world. Club president Rodney Prescott reports.
The Te Awamutu BMX Club is proud to have had two of their members travel to Nantes, France to contest the BMX world champs over the past week.
Leon Dumbell (10 boys) and Baylee Luttrell (under 23 woman) headed to France in great form after some amazing performances in Hamilton at the New Zealand BMX nationals held last April where Leon won the 10 boys national title and Baylee took out the under 23 woman’s title.
In France Leon was racing against a huge field with 119 of the best 10-year-old boys in the world and started his first race well but unfortunately when challenging for the lead slid out in the corner and crashed, which dropped him towards the bottom of the field, with a lot of work to do to get back into contention for a title.
Leon’s next three races all went to plan, moving him up the leader board and on to the quarter finals. He managed fourth in his quarter final then had arguably his best race of the day to finish second in the semifinal.
The eight fastest boys in the world contested the final and they didn’t disappoint. Leon was pipped at the post by a Brazilian and a French rider and managed to hold on and proudly come home with the number three world ranking.
Baylee started strong in her first heat of the day finishing in third place. She came up against some very skilled riders in the semifinal and finished seventh, narrowly missing out on the final and finishing the day in 14th position.
The Te Awamutu club was missing their biggest star from the world champs this year as Rebecca Petch made the difficult decision to skip these champs to instead travel to Birmingham to race on the track with the New Zealand Commonwealth games track team.
Rebecca hasn’t been riding track for that long so when this opportunity came up it was too hard to turn down. It paid off massively for her as the sprint team of herself, Ellesse Andrews and Olivia King dominated their qualifying race and posted a new games record on their way to winning Commonwealth gold.
Rebecca also lined up for the 500m time trial and missed the bronze medal by 0.3s.
As a club its great to see our riders performing on the world’s biggest stage and we are very proud of all of them.
The club will hold two “give it a go” days on September 11 and 18 for anyone wanting to try it out,.
If you have any questions about the sport of BMX, please check out our Facebook or Instagram pages or our website www.tabmxclub.co.nz or you can email [email protected]
