Dan Craven (Team IG-Sigma Sport) will contest the Olympic road race against the world’s best riders this July in the colours of his home nation, Namibia.
When RCUK caught up with Craven at the London IG Nocturne last weekend, he was preparing to fly out to California the following day for a hastily arranged training camp.
“Although we’d been talking about doing the training camp for a while, it only came together recently, and I only booked my ticket yesterday. It’s really last minute and I’m flying out tomorrow,” he said.
His season has been turned on its head by a crash in the An Post Rás that came while Craven was leading the King of the Mountains competition and lying fifth overall.
“I was having a really good race, and had it continued the way it started, while we were three days in out of eight, it would have been a really successful race,” he said.
He refuses to accept misfortune as an excuse for missing the first of his season’s three goals, however.
Accidents are by definition unintended, but when RCUK suggests that not every circumstance in a race is within a rider’s control, Craven responds by paraphrasing the great South African golfer, Gary Player: “The harder you train, the luckier you get.”
With Player’s mantra in mind, Craven has booked his flight, and prepared himself for some hard motor pacing sessions and local races in California. “My coach is really drilling me at the moment; it’s only 49 days until the Olympic road race.”
Craven has with him a sample from Castelli of the kit the Namibian team will wear in the Olympic road race and speaks with an obvious affection for his homeland.
He admits he has ground to make up, but insists things are going well. The truth of this statement is revealed later in the conversation, when, on an unrelated topic, Craven reveals that three days earlier he completed a training ride of more than six hours.
Like Ed Clancy and Andy Tennant, other riders with Olympic ambitions present at the Nocturne, Craven is a spectator. He soaks in the atmosphere of a warm summer’s evening in central London where an estimated 12,000 people have turned out to watch a bike race.
I ask what at an event like the Nocturne says about cycling in Britain, Craven’s adopted home. Has the presence of riders like Matt Goss and Ian Stannard, his own team, tonight fielding Daniel Lloyd, and their British rivals in the Halfords Tour Series proved an irresistible draw?
Craven sees the situation from the other end of the telescope. “The top riders are here because the people are here,” he surmises.
During a four year amateur career in Austria, and in Italy (“the heartland of world cycling”), Craven says he did not encounter races like the Nocturne, whose success he sees as a reflection of the popularity of the Tour Series, the Tour of Britain, and other big domestic races. “British cycling has got something,” he says. “It has an innovation and energy that is fantastic.”
The Tour of Britain and the Olympic road race represent Craven’s two remaining “major goals” for the season. His passion for racing, and for racing in the UK, is evident, as is his pride in representing his homeland in the forthcoming Olympics. That his opportunity to do so will come on British roads seems to suit him just fine.
