Te Awamutu’s BMX club can take a slice of credit for Olympian Rebecca Petch’s Paris silver medal.
Petch began riding for the club as a preschooler – and competed in the BMX event at the 2020 Olympics before switching to track cycling.
See: Petch at the games double
New Zealand’s sprint cycling team for the Paris Olympic Games (from left) Rebecca Petch, Shaane Fulton and Ellesse Andrews with travelling reserve Olivia King. They are standing on the stage at the Velodrome where the team was announced against the official sponsors backdrop.
She and Cambridge’s Ellesse Andrews and Tauranga born Shaane Fulton made up the women’s cycling sprint team which picked up silver in the Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines Velodrome in Paris this week.
The three-women sprint relay was won by Great Britain.
Te Awamutu BMX club president Rodney Prescott said the club was “super proud” and hoped to get her Petch back to the club track when she returned to Waipā.
He said her experience in BMX gave her an advantage as lead cyclist in the sprint event when it came to pushing out of the gate.
The daughter of Sonya and Barry Petch, who turned 26 a month ago, is a former Pekapekarau primary, Te Awamutu Intermediate and College student.
She adds her silver to the gold she won in the team sprint event with Andrews and Olivia King at the 2022 Commonwealth Games in Birmingham.
When she was named in the New Zealand team in May, Petch told The News journalist Steph Bell Jenkins how she was excited at the prospect of having family with her in Paris. When she competed in Tokyo family, fellow club members and friends gathered at a restaurant to watch “because no one was allowed to be in Tokyo at that point”.
Petch had been commuting regularly from her home in Pirongia, where she lives with husband Jarrod Browning, to train at the Velodrome in Cambridge.
Coffee time: Sherwood Forestry arborist Joseph Sturdy stops off for a coffee from Rebecca Petch, centre, and fellow Kiwi and Te Awamutu team BMXer Baylee Luttrell.
For two years she ran a mobile barista operation out of the old Bunning’s car park in Cambridge. Little Petchy was a 1961 Gypsy caravan she bought in Ōtorohanga, gutted back to its bones and renovated to become a mobile coffee place.
She switched from BMX in October 2022 and described the move after 21 years in the sport as one of the biggest decisions she had made.
“…my whole life was around BMX, and my family has supported me all the way through, and it was just really tough to move on from that kind of community to a new one… it was hard`, but it was worth it.”
Petch and Andrews joined fellow Waipā Olympians Emma Twigg, Brooke Francis and Lucy Spoors as medal winners in Paris.
The Cambridge rowing duo of Francis and Spoors beat reigning Olympic and world champions Ancuta Bodnar and Simona Radis of Romania to win the women’s double sculls at Vaires-sur-Marne Nautical Stadium, 20km east of Paris.
The duo featured in The News recently discussing their selection for the Games – and their lives since both having children in late 2022.
Twigg won silver in the single sculls on Saturday behind Karolein Florijn of the Netherlands. She and wife Charlotte Twigg have a two-year-old son Tommy who was there to see his mum win a medal.
Waipā had several other medal opportunities – in cycling, canoeing and on the track – pending when The News went to press.
Rebecca Petch
