Brydon aiming for peak at nationals

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32715, 18 September 1971, Page 14

Brydon aiming for peak at nationals

(By

R. M. CAIRNS)

“Now the sport is not as enjoyable as it was during those couple of years when I was a j unior. I am back on the scratch mark. It is harder, there are more pressures the same as when I was a novice.”

The speaker was P. D. Brydon, unquestionably the man of the moment in Canterbury cycling, irrespective of whether he wins today’s centre championship and even considering the rise to national prominence of J. I. Ryder, of Timaru.

This, quite simply, is the first year Brydon has allowed his talents full rein. He has put firmly behind him those days as a junior, in 1968-69, when his performances—which would nave satisfied many—were not in keeping with his ability.

But the Rangiora 19-year-old had his .reasons. “It was through work, really. I wanted to get through tny time”—he is a painter—"and it only meant a couple of years, and I knew I would be doing, in cycling, what I’m doing now.

“Also, probably as long as four years ago, I thought if I was going to get to a Games, it would be in 1974. I didn’t know then they would be in Christchurch.”

Brydon’s feelings on why he is going so well this season—Saturday’s superb performance in the Shirley Lodge classic was the highpoint—are straightforward. “It is because I am training; I am doing so many miles. And in the last two or three weeks, the time I’ve been having off work has made a difference.”

Brydon’s fine performances this year have been on the road. But he confesses that Until this road season, he considered himself a track rider. “ I suppose this is. because I have gone better on the track. It has not required the same training.” Now he plans “ a bit of both.” He considers, rather modestly, that he is “a reasonable allround rider.”

That is rather understating the career of a young man who was first equal and second in national junior sprint championships and then in the winning senior pursuit team at last season’s New Zealand track titles.

Further, he won the provincial novice road championship in 1967, and was' runner-up .in the junior championship the next year.' Today, he is favourite for the senior race at Sefton. Brydon would obviously like that championship but, he says, he has been aiming at the national championships all season. “I would like to raise the New Zealand selectors’ eyes at the nationals, and in the Olympic Games trials,” he said when asked his immediate ambition. “Further than that? Well, naturally anyone would like to ride at Munich but there are so many obstacles.” Like so many leading Canterbury cyclists, Brydon received his early grounding from the Rangiora novice club. He was carried along in the early wave of enthusiasm when the club started in about 1964.

He was playing a lot of Rugby then—he locked for the North Canterbury under 12 team—but was talked into riding, in the old sports bike days by R. C. Archer, who was later to become a Canterbury representative.

"It was a change from football, although I kept playing in that first season,

but then I got really wrapped in cycling. Halfway through that first season, I got a racing bike and I’ve been riding since.” He remembers well an early event held by the Mairehau Novice Wheelmen. “Blair \ Stockwell came along one day, his. first proper race, and was off the break mark with me. He was first and fastest that day and I haven’t seen him since in a race—until this year.” This is partly because Stockwell, two years older than Brydon, has not ridden in the same grade and partly because of Brydon’s own placement of work before sport. Now, however, Brydon is the senior partner on the scratch mark, and a much more complete cyclist than when he was a novice. All that remains is for this development to be taken to a logical and higher level.