Getting selected for the U23 Worlds in his first year is a sign of things to come from Jack Wilson
By Brian Canty
Former National Junior Champion, Jack Wilson is still without a team for next season despite having ridden this year’s Wold Championships in Holland while also acquitting himself admirably throughout the season with the Belgian based UCS Crabbé Performance VOO team.
Wilson, 19, admitted time is running out for next season and he’s none too keen on the idea of being based at home.
“I’m not sure where I’ll be,” he told stickybottle.
“I’ll probably go back out to Belgium but I emailed a load of teams and they haven’t gotten back to me yet so I’ll find out in two or three weeks, once I keep asking. The thing is, all the teams will be filled up for 2013 soon so that’s the only problem. I could be racing at home yet. That would be a step back but what can you do? If you don’t have a team, you don’t have a team. I can’t do much about it. ”
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His 2012 team ran into difficulty and announced they couldn’t put a squad together for next year, which is why Wilson finds himself in his current predicament.
“Their U23 side is folding. They’re generally a junior team and they just ride for a couple of years to expand in the U23 category amateur ranks but it didn’t work out this time. I don’t think it was financial problems but I think it was the management, I didn’t get the details but they just said there wouldn’t be a team next year.”
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The Belfast native said his year was a disaster from the word go.
“It was a pretty disastrous year really, I never had consistent form. I was sick, always up and down with my form. In the dumps and then buzzing, it was just a roller coaster. It was never steady or a constant batch of form.”
As for the reasons behind his health issues, he suggested it could have stemmed from any one of the brutal races he took part in early on in the year.
“There’s races two or three times a week. It’s just non-stop racing. It was early season when I got sick. I rode that Beverbeek Classic and there was a race Brussels-Zepprem after and when I rode it, at the start it was about 7-8 degrees. But then we rode out of the neutralised zone it was about three degrees and pissing rain and that was four and a half hours of shivering on the bike. Then I got off and I was still cold two days later.”
“Then after that I just started going downhill and getting sick after every race and kept panicking and trying to come back but just digging and digging a hole for myself. What I should have done was taken two weeks off, and said ‘right, I start again in two weeks’. But when you’re out in that environment it’s hard to content yourself.”
He did ride the Worlds, however, and that was an experience he’ll never forget, despite learning some harsh lessons.
“I was sitting so comfortably in the bunch all day, just cruising and then two laps to go there was a crash in front of me and I thought, oh flip I’m at the back of the bunch here so when I got back on I had absolutely killed myself. Then coming down the descent into the bottom of the Cauburg I went up that, the springs came off and that was it, game over.”
“There were 50 or so boys behind me and I just towed them onto the back of the bunch and I just killed myself. I just panicked. But there’s more to come yet from me, if I could just stay a bit healthier and gauge my effort a bit better and stuff like that.”
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