Singapore’s mountain bikers enjoyed a double dose of racing action last weekend with Dimas Pamungkas taking the main downhill honours at the Kent Ridge Carnival on Saturday, while Riyadh Hakim struck gold for two days in a row, claiming cross-country wins at both Kent Ridge and Jungle Cross II on the Sunday.
 
With its well-established Jungle Cross series, cycling events outfit Cycosports has provided Singapore’s mountain bikers with a steady stream of competitive action over the past few years, but those races at the Centaurs Trail in Turf City have been overwhelmingly geared towards the cross-country fraternity. However, that changed last Saturday when Cycosports staged the inaugural Kent Ridge Carnival, which saw downhill racing take centre stage.

Click on this link to read the full double race report.

The 2018 MetaSprint Series ended on Sunday with a hugely competitive MetaSprint Triathlon, which saw defending champion Colin O’Shea clinch the men’s title with a scintillating time of 58 minutes and 30 seconds. As fast as his performance was, though, it wasn’t enough to win the Champion of Champions crown, that honour going to Jennifer Zenker, who put in a dominating wire-to-wire performance to not only defend her women’s title but also hold off all the men for the second year in a row.
 
Now in its 11th year, the MetaSprint Series shows no sign of losing its appeal with almost 2,000 competitors and hundreds more supporters and spectators flocking to the race village yesterday on what was a beautiful Sunday morning at the East Coast Park, the traditional home of triathlon in Singapore. As well as the sprint-distance contests which give the MetaSprint Series its name, also on the program were the usual Discovery, Youth and Kids races, and new for this year the Kids Scootathlon. Click on this link to read the full race report.

The OCBC Cycle Singapore National Team Time Trial Championships returned to the Tanah Merah Coastal Road on Sunday on what was a gala occasion for the Singapore road cycling scene. There were many winners, but a quartet from the Allied World Kemp Technologies racing team claimed the most prestigious title when they swept to victory in the Elite Men’s Open Quad category. In the Elite Women’s Quad, it was Anza Cycling who took the honours.

A further 105 teams did battle for the other 13 Quad and Duo titles that were up for grabs. That’s an astonishing number of cyclists and shows the rude health of the sport in Singapore. Click on this link to read the full race report.

At the conclusion of three days of thrilling action on Sunday, the Tour de Bintan crowned 14 general classification champions, awarded 14 UCI jerseys and sent over 200 racers home with hard-earned tickets to the 2018 world amateur cycling championships.

While the 2018 edition marked the eighth running of the Tour de Bintan, it was just the second time that Southeast Asia’s premier amateur cycling tour also incorporated two qualifying races for the UCI Gran Fondo World Championships, a.k.a., those world amateur championships. The move by race organisers MetaSport to join the UCI Gran Fondo World Series (GFWS) in 2017 appears to have been an unqualified success, with vastly increased participatory numbers for the Tour de Bintan last year and then another boost in numbers for the just-concluded race. Click here to read the full race report.

Ben Arnott of the Specialized Roval Mavericks claimed the elite Men’s Open title at the 2018 Tour of Phuket on Sunday at the end of three days of hard racing in southern Thailand, while Sarah Schnieder (MatadorRacing) was crowned the champion in the Women’s Open contest.

The successful pair were just two of the approximately 200 riders who took part in the third edition of the three-day race organised by the leading cycling events outfit Cycosports. Most of the cyclists flew into the renowned holiday destination that is Phuket for the race and most no doubt returned to their homes in Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaysia, other parts of Thailand and elsewhere around the region highly satisfied with their experience.

Click here to read the full race report.

Power on the bike was the key to success in Sunday’s MetaSprint Series Duathlon at Singapore’s F1 Village, as Anna Eberhardt and Alan Blakie built decisive leads on the second leg of the run-bike-run race on their way to clinching the women’s and men’s titles respectively. Eberhardt enjoyed a double victory, as the world-class duathlete easily held off the men in the Equaliser “battle of the sexes” to be crowned Champion of Champions.

Even at that early hour, the race village was already buzzing for one of the most eagerly anticipated events on the annual multisports calendar. Set amid a backdrop of the F1 Pit Building, the Singapore Flyer, Marina Bay and the stunning city skyline, it’s easy to see why the MetaSprint Duathlon has such a special feel.

Click here to read the full race report.

With a stacked field of elite athletes the 2018 MetaSport Aquathlon promised to be an exciting affair and it certainly delivered as Tim Cosulich produced a scintillating performance to win both the Men’s Elite and the Champion of Champions titles by the narrowest of margins at Sentosa’s Palawan Beach yesterday.

Anna Eberhardt took the Women’s Elite crown and was so close to winning the Equalizer “battle of the sexes”, only being caught by Cosulich with 500m to go.

Race organisers MetaSport must keep a weather genie in their office as year in, year out the sun shines down out of clear blue skies on the Aquathlon, the traditional opening leg of the MetaSprint Series.  Click here to read the full race report.

The off-road cycling series Jungle Cross returned to Singapore’s Turf City yesterday on a newly revamped course at the Centaurs Trail, but the result in the elite Men’s Open mountain bike race was a familiar one as the evergreen Junaidi Hashim (Team Awano) took the victory over his young protégé Riyadh Hakim. The Men's Open cyclocross title went to Bastian Dohling (Specialized Roval Mavericks).

Click on this link to read how those two contests went down, plus all the results from the other seven events on the race card.

Ghazzi Krisna made it two for two at the URA-CFS Share the Road Criterium on Sunday, as the 21-year-old rider from Geylang Cycling Team outsprinted his breakaway partner Konstantin Fast (Nex Cycling Team) to take the elite Men’s Open title. 
 
The local youngster must like the downtown Singapore street circuit as he won the last time he raced on it in October 2017, when he claimed victory in the Inter Educational Institute contest also from a two-man breakaway.

Click on this link to read the full race report. (Photo courtesy of Wai See Chin)

There is no doubt that the URA-CFS Share the Road Criterium series has provided a huge boost to the Singapore road-racing scene in 2017. And fittingly yesterday’s final leg in this year’s series was the best of the bunch, as three races showcasing a diverse range of demographics drew a big crowd that was rewarded with a thrilling morning of action on the CBD circuit.

Andreas Ostern (Specialized Roval Mavericks) gets the top billing for dominating a fast and furious Men’s Open Points Race but Ghazzi Krisna (Geylang Cycling Team) and Janell Ng (West Coast Riders) deservedly share the headlines for winning the Inter-Educational Institute and Women’s Beginners races respectively.

The criterium series started on an experimental basis in January after local cycling events outfit Cycosports and the Singapore Cycling Federation (SCF) managed to get approval from the Singapore Urban Renewal Authority (URA) to stage a race as part of the URA’s Car Free Sunday initiative.

Click on this link to read the full race report.