Maple Ridge professional cyclist Maggie Coles-Lyster is one of 29 athletes from across Canada selected to wear the Maple Leaf on April 12-14 at the 2024 Tissot UCI Track Nations Cup in Milton, Ont.
This racing will be the last chance for track racers to qualify for the Paris 2024 Olympic Games, being held from July 26 to Aug. 11.
Coles-Lyster is one of 10 athletes on Team Canada’s women track endurance team.
Canada will welcome over 300 athletes from 40 nations, including Olympic medallists and World Champions, to this final round of the Tissot UCI Track Nations Cup, the first two stages of which took place in Australia and China earlier this year.
“We have a strong team for this Nations Cup,” said Dan Proulx, Cycling Canada Head Coach. “We have a performance team and a development team entered: our current best riders and the riders of the future. It’s an honour to race in the maple leaf in front of a home crowd. With Paris 2024 in sight, it’s important for us to do well. It will be an intense competition as many other nations are also trying to secure points.”
Coles-Lyster, 25, was Canada’s first-ever junior world champion in track cycling in 2017, and in 2018 won bronze in the team pursuit at the Pan American Track Championships.
Now with the Roland Racing team, she is fresh off a fifth-place finish at the Ronde de Mouscron event in Belgium, on Monday, April 1.
She posted the story of racing at the Ronde van Vlaanderen (Tour of Flanders) for the first time on Sunday on her Instagram account:
“Was feeling good on the big loop, then was hit in one of the crashes at probably the worst time – right as we were entering the climbs. That left me with a mechanical which meant my (teammate) Tamara Dronova was literally pulling me by the arm to make it up the first climb.”
“Bike change on the cobbles, then a 20-minute chase back on just to be on the last wheel up the first cobble climb.”
“Thought that was game over, but just kept making up ground, took a nice jog up the Koppenberg, then found myself in the second big group on the road, where we spent the rest of the race chasing the 24 riders in front of us. Didn’t make the catch, so P26 for me, left my legs somewhere on the Kwaremont, but finished the race buzzing and eager to make the front split in these Classics. If I had to describe it all in one word: iconic.”
Monday she was at it again, taking fifth place.
“And this morning, got to wake up and do it all again,” she wrote. “After an extra cup of coffee and off we went for Ronde de Mouscron, where the day was spent dodging an insane amount of crashes, clawing back in cross winds and finally ignoring the pain in my legs from yesterday to go fifth in the sprint.”
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