Podium Ambition – Sports Tours Pro Cycling Team’s sister Cycling Club, Boot Out Breast Cancer, is now open for you to join.
Membership costs just £15 a year, and for that you’ll become a part of the Podium Ambition umbrella family, able to represent them at any events you choose to take part in.
We met the club’s ambassador riders, those selected as part of the Podium Ambition scholarship scheme, as well as Team Manager and eleven time Paralympic Gold medal holder Dame Sarah Storey at the club launch last night.
At the event, the club colours, represented by the pink and blue hues on its ambassadors Estrella bikes, and merchandise (buy stem caps here!) where revealed, whilst Dame Sarah Storey spoke to an audience about her ambitions for the future.
She said: “It was important to me to create a community of people. One of the things we used to have in swimming [Dame Sarah’s first sport], was that when you stood on a start block, ready to start your race, you weren’t just representing your country, you were representing the club that you belonged to back home. In cycling when you get to a certain level, you go and join a team, and that team is relatively exclusive, you have to have certain race results in order to be allowed to be part of it. It struck Barney [her husband] and I that we had an opportunity to bring the best of those two worlds together and this is what Podium Ambition and the Boot Out Breast Cancer Cycling Club hope to achieve.”
She added: “We want to create an organisation and a community, so that when the very top of that tree stand on the start line, clipped into the gate at a track event, or on the start ramp of the time trial at an international event, or even just down the road at a local time trial – we might stand there in an international jersey, but we’re also representing a huge community of people who are part of our support network back home.
“It might be that when I stand on the start line in Rio, I’m not just thinking about the job in hand, but I know I’ve not just got the country behind me, but I’ve got this incredibly special group of people who have been part of the journey from now all the way through to that start. When we come home from an event, it may be that we come home to a big party as a result!”
The club is open to anyone, of any level of ability, age and gender. It can be a pathway for young athletes or a cycling family for those riding for fun.