Long Beach Teen Will Rep USA at Junior World Track Cycling Championship

Long Beach Teen Will Rep USA at Junior World Track Cycling Championship

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By Brian Addison

 | Thursday, 16 August 2012 09:28

Photos by Brian Addison.

Tara McCormick has an aura about her that is infectious, even beyond the fact that she’s a stellar 17 year-old athlete. It’s hard to imagine what the nation’s top junior track cyclist would be like, so one shouldn’t hold expectations. But she is, through and through, a bubbly, authentically convivial athlete.

And it is due not only to her deep love of the sport of cycling itself, but the deeper familial connection she holds with how she got started.

“My grandma is actually the Masters World Champion,” she stated, “so she passed the torch onto me.”

Her grandparents were always involving her in cycling and her first pedaling experiences were with her grandfather on a tandem bike before she was tall enough to ride on her own. And these weren’t rides around the block. Given her grandparents’ immersion in biking, 40-mile rides were not uncommon (even on the tandem).

Tara’s Bike Pure emblem, an acknowledgement that she’ll refrain from using drugs while biking.

As McCormick got older, cycling became something she found impossibly hard to stop.

“It’ll be my eighth year [competitively biking] in January,” she explains, “so when I started, I just never stopped. Not to mention it’s nice to live in a city where there are bike lanes and cars are beginning to know how to drive around you.”

Her appreciation for Long Beach has existed since she moved here as a baby after being born in Las Vegas. Not only is the city deeply appreciative of bike culture and slowly emerging as an innovator amongst urban spaces in this regard, McCormick has the only Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI)-certified indoor cycling ntrack in nearby Carson that she is able to continually train at.

This training helped her regularly take on 45-mile rides, her most common route being Long Beach to Dana Point. It also initiated her towards her first long ride—100 miles—when she was 11-years-old, taking her from Anaheim to San Diego.

“We had to take the Amtrak back because… That’s a long ride,” she said while laughing. “I passed out for two days.”

These cycling endeavors brought her to her first USA Junior Track Nationals championship, held this past July in Pennsylvania. She competed in an event called the Omnium, an

To read the whole story, visit here: http://www.lbpost.com/sports/2000000831-tara-mccormick-competes-for-the-world-championship

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