Silver and off to Germany

Hi all,

Been a bit slack with the whole blog thing as been travelling to germany for past 24hours. Been a llooonnggg day.

Our Oceania team won Silver at the first ever Youth Olympic Games team triathlon the other day, awesome to get another medal, 2 medals out of 2 opportunities aint bad at all. Below is a race report if you want to rad it. I was honoured  yesterday to accept a gift on behalf of the NZ Youth Olympic team from like our twin school for the Youth Olympics, so that was a great opportunity and a real privlage to take some leadership for the team. At presnt Im in Sigmaringen in southern Germany and loving it, only ben here for half a day so far but its awesome! Lovely lifestyle and awesome laid back village life, definitly going to enjoy my time here. Cant wait for training to start with the elites early this week, will be a great opporunity to learn new stuff and get to know them all. I have internet access for the whole time im in Germany, so will keep this updated.

Thanks for your support
Aaron

Race report:

I teamed up with Maddie Dillion from NZ and Michael Gosman and Ellie Salthouse of Australia to form an Oceania team for the first ever Youth Olympics Team triathlon. Ellie lead off, racing really well and finishing in the main front bunch off the bike and finishing the run in the top 5, only a small gap behind the leaders. Next was Michael and he also raced awesome and held his own, with the leaders being the European and Americas teams opening the gap a little more. Maddie was next, and she had an absolutley amazing ride, gaining 44 seconds on the front bunch and running up 2nd placing when she tagged me. I left about 15 seconds down on an athlete from Argentina who was racing last for the Americas number 1 team, and leaving only about 2 seconds before the Europeans number 1 team. Us 3 had a good lead on the rest, and thats where the medals were at from that point on. The Argentina athlete held his own on the swim, and I worked with the Austrian (Alois Knabl who won bronze in the individual race) on the bike to try bridge the gap on the leader. We were flying, and working extremely hard. I desperatley wanted to bridege the gap, as the run was only 1.6km, so didnt want to muck around and give him much of a lead. The Austrian and myself come off the bike together and I lead out of transition in hot persuit of the Argentina guy, and we were gaining fast, but we were running out of metres to the finish. He had about 30m on us when the Australian coach screamed at me and said "The Argentina guy has a 15sec penalty, so you two are racing for Gold" (the penalty box is about 100m from the finsh, and you must do your penalty there or you are disqualified. As soon as I heard that, I surged desperatly and tried to drop the Austrian. I was hurting bad, completely on the red line, full throtle. He surged back and was simply to strong for me and opened up a small gap. As we passed the penalty box, the Argentina athlete had served about 10sec of his penalty, so I sprinted as hard as I could. He started sprinting after me, and after having a small break, he was absolutly hauling it!!! I held on to take the silver, 3 sec back from the Austrian, and about 5 sec up on the Argentina guy. Was extremely satisfying to get another medal and proud of how our team raced, it was awesome!!!