Fraine looks to future races

Press, 30 September 1988, Page 16

Fraine looks to future races

PA Nelson The national cycling team captain, Greg Fraine, is not about to retire despite a “disappointing” performance in last week’s 100 km team time trial at Seoul. Fraine returned home to Nelson on Tuesday — a week earlier than planned — and set out on a 65km training ride yesterday to prepare for next week’s national championships in Dunedin. Fraine, who dropped out after 70km of the gruelling race, said yesterday he never seriously considered retiring. But, initially, he felt he had “let Nelson down.” “I got so much support from Nelson. The day before the race I got a fax message that must have been 30 to 40 feet long. It was brilliant. “When you get that sort

of support you want to do your best for the people who are behind you. “But I know I tried my hardest and did my best on the day. There’s no way you go to the Olympics to pull out of the race.

“I would have liked to have gone better, for sure, but it was just one of those things. It’s the first time I’ve had a bad day in international racing.”

Fraine and the New Zealand team “went out fast” over the first 50km of the hilly Seoul course, and were well up with the pace. But on the second lap, Fraine began “to feel it on the hills and started to think it wasn’t that easy.” After 70km, Fraine knew he could go no further and dropped off the team bunch, weaved across the road to avoid

the New Zealand team support van and came to a stop — his Seoul dream dashed.

“I tried to hang on for as long as I could to help the rest of the team. But in the end I was shattered, finished, I couldn’t have gone any further.”

The rest of the team — Brian Fowler, Gavin Stevens and Paul Leitch — clung on to finish twelfth over-all in two hours 03:48.75, bettering their time in last year’s world championships. Fraine, naturally, was “really disappointed” after the race. “But I got a lot of help from my team-mates. They were really good about it. They said it was just one of those things. "Our coaches told me I was the guy who had towed the other guys through before and the

one who had always been reliable so don’t feel bad about it.” Fraine said every year he had been with the New Zealand squad, the team had lost a rider, including the 1982 Edinburgh Commonwealth Games silver medal winning team when Blair Cox dropped out. “The only way around it is to have a supercontrolled sports medicine programme where our diet is controlled and we are tested regularly, with blood samples taken from the ear every day to measure glucose levels. “That’s the way the Eastern bloc do it. We’re schoolkids compared with them. They’re just machines.”

Despite being forced out of his race on the first day of the Games competition, Fraine had an eventful Olympics.

He, team-mate Leith and the Nelson-based Olympic team cycling mechanic, Jim Matthews, were ordered to leave an open-air market because of Korean resentment at the controversy following New Zealand boxing referee, Keith Walker’s, handling of a Korean’s Olympic bout. “The management said New Zealanders weren’t wanted there,” Fraine said.

“It was quite scary because we thought the guy was joking. We didn’t know how serious the incident was because it had only happened an hour before. New Zealand athletes were later advised by team management to tell Koreans they were Australians if quizzed about their nationality, Fraine said.